David Hare, a surrealist and abstract-expressionist sculptor and photographer, was born in New York City March 10, 1917. From 1936 to 1937 he studied biology and chemistry at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He had no formal training in art but began by experimenting. He took up photography in the 1930s, and by the end of the decade was working in color. The Walker Galleries in New York exhibited his photographs in 1939.

In the late 1930s, he was commissioned by New York's American Museum of Natural History to document the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Twenty images were published in 1940 in portfolio form through the complicated color-dye-transfer process.

By this time, Hare had developed an automatist process ...