Harvey Lloyd (Born 1926) is an influential American photographer and the leading figure in the "Breaking the Light" photographic movement.[1][2] He is well known for both his realistic and abstract photography. Lloyd trained under the legendary Alexey Brodovitch and his photography spans a range of realistic styles from advertising to aerial photography to nature photography, and social photography; as well as, more recently, abstract styles. Lloyd uses his abstract work to inform his realistic work.
Lloyd was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish Ukrainian immigrants. He attended public schools in New York. He spent one year at Cooper Union in New York studying graphic art and art direction.
Lloyd began his career as a graphic designer for the old American Weekly Hearst Sunday Magazine in New York. In the 1950s he created his own companies Graphic Arts Center and APA and Lloyd Inc. where he practiced traditional graphic design. In the 1960s, he attended Brodovitch's Design Laboratory in New York for graphic designers. He made slide shows for projection in the workshop using images and sound in an aleatory manner to discover serendipitous and unexpected combinations of audio-visual experiences. He then attended Brodovitch's Design Laboratory Workshops for photography. He became involved in photojournalism using a realistic traditional style of photography.
Lloyd's interest in photojournalism was accompanied by an interest in and practice of abstract photography. Initially, his approach was in the manner of traditional photographic abstraction--seeing patterns of peeling paint, tattered wall poster ads, patterns of every kind. His traditional still color and black-and-white photography transformed in 1995 with his first photography of the Halloween Eve parade up Sixth Avenue in Manhattan at dusk and night. He made blurred several-second exposures of the grotesquely masked witches, skeletons, etc., and fired his camera mounted flash during the long exposures. These images straddled between the real and the abstract blurred impressions. These post abstract expressionistic and post impressionist images "reinvented" the over two hundred year old "What you see is what you get" art of still film photography. He made tens of thousands of these images around Manhattan at night. He and his colleagues coined the expression "Breaking the Light" to describe this style of photography.
In 2010 he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. From Santa Fe he traveled approximately eighty thousand thousand miles to photograph National Parks and Pueblo ruins. He used his classic still film realistic technique. However his work was influenced by Breaking the Light. In addition, Quantum physics, metaphysics and Eastern philosophy influenced the realistic work.