Lance Hidy, Photography and graphic design professor, NECC

Northern Essex Community College Graphic Design Professor Lance Hidy will give a timely presentation on Ansel Adams as an environmentalist and photographer at Nichols Village, 1 Nichols Way, Groveland on Monday evening, October 1 at 6:30 p.m.

Free and open to the public, this presentation coincides with the exhibit “Ansel Adams: At the Water’s Edge” which is on display at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem through October 8.  Also, on September 25, Little, Brown, and Company will release a new book about Ansel Adams—“Looking at Ansel Adams: The Photographs and the Man”—which is written by Andrea Stillman, Adam’s assistant and former assistant curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and designed by Hidy.

Hidy’s slide presentation will cover Ansel Adams’ long career, which started with a box camera and a trip to Yosemite at the age of 12. He will share Ansel Adams’ work with the Sierra Club, The National Park Service, and the environmental movement of the 1960s.

Ansel Adams is a familiar topic for Hidy. The professor knew Adams personally and he has designed six books and an iPad app on Adams for Little, Brown, & Company.

A graphic design and photography instructor at Northern Essex in Haverhill, Hidy majored in art at Yale University from 1964 to 1968 and later studied privately with Leonard Baskin.

He was co-founder of David R. Godine, Publisher in 1969, before starting his own design firm in 1973. He switched from books to posters and illustration in 1980, incorporating his love of printmaking with his training in letterforms.

He was the art director of Harvard Business Review and has designed three U.S. postage stamps. In addition to running his design and illustration studio and teaching, Hidy has lectured and written on design history.

Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1947. Photograph by Ansel Adams. Courtesy of the Ansel Adams Trust

This presentation is made possible through the Northern Essex Community College Speakers Bureau.  For more information on the speakers’ bureau, visit the college’s website necc.mass.edu or contact Ernie Greenslade, director of public relations, 978 556-3862 or egreenslade@necc.mass.edu.

For more information on the October 1 slide presentation, contact Wendy McGrath, activities director, Nichols Village, 978 372-3930 or wmcgrath@nichols-village.com