“So Pure and Bright a Light”*: Photographs in Praise of Place by Carl Austin Hyatt
Conference Room, CSWR, 42 Francis Ave.
Cambridge, MA
Mon., Sep. 14, 2026, 4 – 5:30 p.m. 
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
*Title phrase drawn from Henry David Thoreau.
“That aim in life is the highest which requires … a lifetime to appreciate a single phenomenon! You must camp down beside it, as for life, having reached your land of promise, and give yourself wholly to it.”
—Henry David Thoreau
As Thoreau understood, perception is an intentional and participatory act—an act of intimacy sustained by the heart. It is a lived commitment. For New Hampshire Seacoast–based photographer Carl Austin Hyatt, reading Thoreau as a young man inspired a passion to find his own “land of promise.” The New England coast has become for Hyatt what Walden was for Thoreau.
“Today, as ever,” Hyatt says, “sustained intimacy with our natural surroundings generates a world of its own, reciprocally nurturing the soul of the artist and what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the World Soul.” As Hyatt has observed, “The fate of the world rests on humanity awakening to our ensouled world.”
Carl Austin Hyatt uses classical, film-based, large-format black-and-white photography to create images of profound formal beauty. He believes that art’s priceless gift is a form of “transmission.” This understanding informs his photographs of natural and human-made landscapes, stones, shorelines, and the human figure.
His images—including photographs of road-salt piles that resemble ancient mountains and sacred pyramids—elicit a visceral response to the world, suggesting the revelation of ineffable presences that transcend the factual. As Hyatt explains, “There are things we all know but dismiss because we distrust our believing. This is our cultural condition. It has taken me years to believe in what I know.”
Hyatt’s work is represented in collections throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and South America. His prints are held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Addison Gallery of American Art; and other institutions. He is a MacDowell Colony fellow and a member of the National Parks Arts Foundation Advisory Board.
Programming Series: Transcendentalism
Gazette Classification: Art/Design
Sponsor: Center for the Study of World Religions
Contact: Laurie D. Sedgwick, CSWR Events Coordinator, [email protected]
More info: cswr.hds.harvard.edu…