Jonathan C. Hyman earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College in New York City, where he studied painting and photography. He was an Eagelson Scholar and a Somerville Art Prize recipient at Hunter, and as an undergraduate art major and education minor at Rutgers University, Hyman was a Henry Rutgers Honors Scholar.

The focus of Hyman’s work is centered on contemporary American popular culture (and more generally), visual culture, and a variety of sub-genres including but not limited to: public memory and memorialization; American funerary tradition; public expression and speech; community folk life; folk art; the American flag; social class; and authenticity. From 2008-2016 Hyman was Associate Director for Conflict and Visual Culture Initiatives at the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College. In addition to contributing work as a freelance photo-essayist for the Kingston, New York based Chronogram Magazine, Hyman is currently engaged in four projects.

Visual Culture in the Epoch of Trump: Signs, Masks, Rallies, Public Speech and Protest: 2016-2026*
This project centers on Donald Trump’s 2016, 2020, and 2024 election campaigns, his rise to power, and the ongoing public expression and dialogue across the culture surrounding the Trump Presidencies and the of dissent post-2024 election. Areas of focus include but are not limited to organized Women’s Marches, Black Lives Matter rallies, Pro-Trump rallies, issues related to the politics of masking and vaccinations during the Coronavirus Pandemic, anti-Trump, anti-DOGE, anti-ICE, and pro-democracy speech. The conceptual anchor for this project is its emphasis on visual culture and the public expression of personal beliefs, private emotions, and the illustration of ideological alignments aflame in the culture - sometimes vulgar and profane - as part of contemporary public discourse regarding democratic principles, race, religion, the politics of immigration & sexual identity, and indeed, the future of our republic.

Portraiture, Memorialization, and Grief in The Landscape explores the new and idiosyncratic ways Americans have both co-opted and altered the American funerary tradition by portraying themselves and memorializing “loved ones” via deeply personal narratives in public spaces including cemeteries, the roadside, body art, and various other areas where public dialogue can be promulgated.

1969 Woodstock Concert:
Since 2018 Hyman has been documenting events, artwork, social and cultural activities, and the landscape itself surrounding the site of the ubiquitous three-day concert held in Bethel, New York in mid-August, 1969. This material includes images from five consecutive days of shooting in August of 2019 when the 50th anniversary of this seminal moment in American cultural history was celebrated in and around the town of Bethel and other areas of Sullivan County, New York. Hyman’s project also documents the approximate 100 large, painted sculptural “Woodstock Doves" placed throughout Sullivan County.

A New Americana: Visual Responses to 9/11:
More than two decades past the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, in continuance of work he is well known for, Hyman is photographing, documenting, and writing about relevant and ongoing vernacular public expressions made in response to the attacks. Jonathan C. Hyman’s 9/11 documentary photography project began on the day of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Realizing right away that the spontaneous memorials and expressions of heartfelt sorrow, and grief, anger, unity, and patriotism were, by their nature, ephemeral, he set out to document the enormous outpouring of vernacular art (folk art) and memorials Americans were making and displaying in public. His work documents the many thousands of artworks and memorials that Americans left on or near the side-of-the-road in response to the attacks. Hyman’s is a large and comprehensive archive composed of a variety of different genres ranging from small handmade flags, banners, and candles to large-scale memorials, murals, tattoos, and flags emblazoned on automobiles, buildings, and human skin.

This body of 9/11 work consisting of photographs, oral histories, writing, and story-telling narratives compiled over the course of twenty-four years, documents the creation and evolution of a vernacular memorial culture with its own visual language surrounding the September 11th attacks. In addition to a large solo exhibition accompanied by a color catalogue in 2006 that not only marked the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but also represented the first public programming of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero in New York City, Hyman’s work was featured by the Museum a second time in a year-long special exhibition beginning in May, 2015. The exhibition titled, Beyond Ground Zero: 9/11 and the American Landscape, Photographs by Jonathan C. Hyman, featured thirty-eight photographs, nine large-scale mural size reproductions of his photographs, educational programming, and an online gallery component. The images in the exhibition represented selections from the more than fifty of Hyman’s works in what the museum considers one of its cornerstone collections.

Hyman’s 9/11 work has been featured on television and online by The PBS NewsHour, Time Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Post, The Journal of American History, Agence France-Press, El Mundo, Der Spiegel, the Mid-Hudson News and other magazines, newspapers, and textbooks in America, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Canada, and Australia. His 9/11 photography has also been featured in solo exhibitions at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the Duke University Library, the Monmouth University Center for the Arts, and the Wald/Kim Gallery in New York City. The photographer has lectured widely in the United States and also in Europe as a U. S. State Department Cultural Envoy.

Jonathan C. Hyman’s work is the subject of a book published in 2013 by the University of Texas Press titled, The Landscapes of 9/11: A Photographer’s Journey. Co-edited by renowned public historian Edward T. Linenthal, Hyman, and University of Michigan scholar Christiane Gruber, this hybrid book features 100 of Hyman’s photographs and essays by well-known scholars and curators. Noted scholar and Director of The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, James Young said of the book, “... from murals to landscape installations to tattoos, painted automobiles, and everything in between, these images demand a very careful accounting and historicizing, which they receive in fine accompanying essays. This is an important book. ”Shannon Perich, Curator of the Smithsonian’s Division of Culture and the Arts, states, “There are bodies of work that document the varied American responses to Vietnam, other wars, and national issues, but none with the same focus on the intersection between national tragedy, personal experience and public expression. Like Alexander Gardner’s Civil War work, Hyman’s is a rare and historically important group of materials that will sit as a central point of departure for September 11th imagery and the understanding of our era.”

* Visual Culture in the Epoch of Trump: Signs, Rallies, Masks, Public Speech and Protest: 2016-2025: Hyman has been engaged in this project since the spring of 2016. This work was not undertaken to endorse or disparage particular politicians and/or their supporters, social movements, or anyone else who speaks publicly about the issues contested in our culture since Donald Trump began his ascendency to the presidency. As a photographer with an interest in public art making, public speech and public discourse across contemporary popular culture, and in general, “things by the side of the road,” Hyman has traveled from his home in Bethel, New York to states along the east coast from Maine to Florida and parts of the Mid-west documenting election related signs and displays, various types of marches, rallies, and ephemera in rural, suburban, and urban environments. In addition to documenting the first Women’s March in Washington D.C. in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Hyman has photographed many Women’s Marches and political rallies ranging from the “No Hate No Fear” March against anti-Semitism in New York City, to other marches and vigils centering on gun and immigration issues. Additionally, he has also extensively photographed everyday life during the Coronavirus Pandemic, as well as “Coronavirus is a hoax,” pro-Trump/open the economy rallies and a multitude of Black Lives Matter rallies. In the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election, Jonathan C. Hyman spent several weeks traveling the Delaware River Corridor between Wilmington, Delaware and Binghamton, New York, photographing the public expressions and displays for and against candidates Trump and Harris while also conducting informal oral histories. Though he took pictures in Delaware, New Jersey, and New York during this time, the focus was on Pennsylvania, particularly the hotly contested Lehigh Valley region. Hyman’s itinerary included cities and counties such as Reading, Allentown, Easton, Bethlehem, Hellertown, Kutztown, Nazareth, Scranton, Stroudsburg, Philadelphia, West Chester, Bucks, and Montgomery Counties. The images for the Epoch of Trump project are made as the subject matter and people appear in the landscape when the photographer comes upon them, all the while keeping in mind his interest in handmade objects, the American flag, and the houses, buildings, automobiles, and neighborhoods where people live and work. The subjects of these, time of Trump images - the people, signs, displays, and speech in the landscape - reveal not only the physical world of contemporary American culture, but also illustrate an ongoing, contested, passionate, and sometimes idiosyncratic and no-holds-barred public conversation and visual vernacular language.

For the most part, in the geographic areas covered by Hyman, the visual language of the Trump campaign dominated the landscape in the run-up to the 2024 election. Despite the fact that some of the Trump imagery remains in place, a significant turnaround in the authorship and placement of public expression and visual discourse has taken place.

Hyman has continued to photograph public discourse of private emotion and defiance in the landscape by photographing the fierce backlash that emerged at the start of the second Trump presidency. He has traveled to Vermont, Massachusetts, and throughout the Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, metropolitan regions (and other areas on the East Coast), to photograph rallies and protests, with a special interest in the anti-Musk rallies at Tesla dealerships and anti-ICE/pro-immigration rallies. This ongoing work documenting the firestorm of objection to President Trump and his policies and initiatives, sheds light on the fabric and complexity of the zeitgeist. Hyman’s documentary work illustrates not only this, but the further proliferation of a cultural permissiveness found at the intersection of private emotion and public expression which began, in many ways, with the overwhelming public response to the 9/11 attacks. Photographer Hyman’s body of work tracks these developments as they have evolved over multiple decades, from the Bush and Obama presidencies into the post-Obama world of the Trump epoch.