[2] Van Dyke went to the University of California, Berkeley, circa 1927[3][1] dropping out for a time to avoid taking an ROTC course,[citation needed] left in 1929 and did not graduate.

[4] "I had been playing around with a camera and developing my own pictures since I was 12 years of age"[5]In 1928, he went to see a photographic exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, where he not only saw some Edward Weston’s work but met him.

[8] Van Dyke's photographs were marked by a tendency to address social issues, as in portraits of migrant workers, as well as purely formal subjects.

[9] In 1945, Van Dyke was commissioned to make an official film called San Francisco about the conference that created the United Nations Organization.

[2] After leaving the Museum of Modern Art in 1977, he became a professor at the State University of New York at Purchase, and founded its film program and remained there until 1981.

Van Dyke died, 23 January 1986, in Jackson, Tennessee,[12] of a heart attack, driving from his home in Santa Fe, N.M. to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had recently been named laureate artist in residence at Harvard.

[6] Van Dyke was survived by his wife, Barbara (née Millikin), a daughter, Alison, three sons, Peter, Murray, and Neil, and grandchildren.