VIEWFINDER

Shared Connection to the Land Helps Bridge the Miles

A CHANCE MEETING THAT keeps repeating sounds like a Hollywood movie plot. For photographer Jack Dykinga, recurring encounters with a German hiker on the Colorado Plateau ceased being coincidental long ago. Dykinga has always felt a strong connection to the red sandstone formations of the vast plateau. But a series of unplanned rendezvous in this windswept wilderness convinced him of the power the rocks hold over others as well.

"I visit the same places over and over again, hiking off in new directions of both discovery and self-discovery," he says. "It's where my ashes will rest, mingling with the coral pink sands when I'm gone."

For now, the tread on Dykinga's hiking boots is the only thing mingling with the sands, but his footprints aren't the only ones tracking through this remote stretch of desert. He shares his passion for this place with a kindred spirit who lives half a world away, and their pilgrimages intersect here again and again.

I count Jack Dykinga among the best landscape photographers today. He developed a style and standard of excellence that raise his work to the level of art. Through his imagery we grasp his reverence for the land. Creativity and land ethic feed off each other.

Photography led Dykinga in two different directions during his 42-year career. From 1964 to 1981, he worked as a newspaper photojournalist. His photographic exposé of the deplorable conditions at the Lincoln and Dixon state schools in Illinois won him a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 1971, and brought much-needed attention to the practice of "warehousing" the mentally ill.

After moving to Arizona, he rediscovered the outdoors and turned his focus to the landscape. A 4x5 view camera has replaced 35 mm as his primary image-making tool for the past 25 years, but his landscape style today draws liberally from his photojournalist past.

"It's a style that's based on combining photojournalism with contemporary landscape photography," he explains. "I have progressed to a style that's very tightly composed with strong angular lines, creating bold patterns to move the viewer's eye into compositions."

In this issue you'll find many examples of Dykinga's landscape photography. His portfolio begins on page 24, featuring the four deserts of Arizona.

"Four deserts in Arizona?" you say. A desert is a desert, right?

Desert climes vary significantly with changes in elevation and latitude, and the plants and animals adapted to one desert won't necessarily thrive in another.

Dykinga, an adapted desert-dweller from Chicago, has helped us interpret the deserts residing in Arizona: the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, Mohave and Great Basin.

It was during an autumn 1997 trip to photograph the Great Basin that Dykinga first crossed paths with a young German named Holger Lorenz. They chanced to meet while hiking the rocky ravines of the Colorado Plateau and immediately hit it off.

"We spoke of the importance of this canyon country's landscape on the soul," Dykinga says. "I noted his appearance, that of someone camping out of his car for five weeks, and suggested that if he were passing through Tucson and needed a hot shower, to give me a call."

That's exactly what Lorenz did. He got his hot shower and a hot meal before they parted company, thinking it was the last they'd see of each other.

Jump ahead to the year 2000. "I'm standing in a hallway in Cologne, Germany, at the Photokina exhibition after giving a lecture on environmental photography when I hear a cheerful, 'Hello Jack!' It's Holger," Dykinga says.

The story gets better. In October 2002, Dykinga is rumbling down the primitive road to remote Hole in the Rock in southern Utah, and comes upon a couple of guys photographing a rattlesnake. It's Lorenz again.

Now, fast forward to June 2005. "I'm camped in the middle of the Colorado Plateau in northern Arizona," as Dykinga tells it. "I was avoiding the heat, enjoying a midday siesta, when I hear an SUV approach and stop. Now, I'm 20 miles down a gravel and mud road, 15 miles beyond that over a very rough, sandy, deeply eroded trail, and about as far as you can be from humanity and still be in a truck." And outside his camper he hears a vaguely familiar voice. "When I open the door, there is Holger, and we both burst into laughter."

In the years since their first chance encounter, Holger Lorenz has become an accomplished photographer in his own right. And although he lives thousands of miles away, like Dykinga his soul is embedded in the sandstone of the Colorado Plateau.

When will the rocks bring them together again?

"To some, these are simply rocks," says Dykinga. "But I've seen the power of these stones."