JOSEF MUENCH

“The photographer’s dream is of finding a place that gives him a new angle on a fresh subject, with special lighting effects, big views interspersed with challenging details, so many and varied that he can go right on shooting and shooting until all his film is used up.”

JOSEF MUENCH

"Other important rules almost teach themselves to those who have ceased to 'snap' pictures and who like to feel that each picture is a faithful and fine record of an experience in their own lives. They are: Pick your subject carefully. Try to keep it simple. If there are too many points of interest, the eye will jump and the result is never satisfying."

That's probably why Arizona Highways Editor Raymond Carlson paid attention to Josef's work, to his attention to detail and to his passion for the landscape during a fortuitous meeting in 1938. A few months later, Carlson published one of Josef's photographs of Rainbow Bridge. In subsequent decades, as biographers at Northern Arizona University's Cline Library assert, "Muench's name became synonymous with Arizona Highways."

The biographers aren't wrong. And it's in large part because Josef had such a delicate, respectful relationship with Arizona's diverse geography and people.

Indeed, in that same 1969 article, Josef admitted that his "life's necessities are earned with the camera as my tool - an artistic medium to record nature's beautiful, often fantastic vagaries, because art is more than a mere repetition of things found about us."

There is something to be said about repetition, however, particularly as it relates to Josef's frequent visits to the Navajo Nation. They were, in a sense, a meditation for him.

Having become friends with renowned trader Harry Goulding, Josef made inroads with the Navajo people, visiting their hogans and photographing them at work and at rest. But he also paid special attention to the landscapes of the Navajo Nation - to delicate sandstone arches; to the mesas and Mittens of Monument Valley; to the ancient walls of Canyon de Chelly, with their patina and their layers and their shadows.

Within a few years, all of those visits paid off, thanks in large part to Goulding and his grand idea. The Navajo people, along with most everyone at the time, were swimming in the belly of the Great Depression. If Goulding could lure Hollywood film directors to Monument Valley to shoot, the Navajos might find some economic relief for years to come.

So, Goulding and his wife, Leone (whom Goulding had nicknamed "Mike"), flew to Los Angeles. They walked into director John Ford's office without an appointment, and when a secretary told them Ford wasn't available, the Gouldings rolled out a Navajo blanket, fanned Josef's photos out across it and waited. And waited. Despite the secretary's protests. Finally, they garnered the attention of an assistant director, and Josef's photographs caught his eye.

The assistant went to find Ford.

Ultimately, the famed director gave Harry Goulding two weeks to hire extras and build facilities to feed and house a film crew - and gave him a blank check to do it. When Goulding succeeded, Ford and a young, up-and-coming actor named John Wayne, along with a supporting cast and a massive crew, descended on Monument Valley to film Stagecoach, 1939's breakout hit.

Two icons were born out of the experience: Wayne as the country's biggest Western star, and Monument Valley as a premier destination for the film industry - which, at the time, was hellbent on canning as many cowboy movies as possible. Because, as the Duke said: "All the screen cowboys behaved like real gentlemen. They didn't drink; they didn't smoke. When they knocked the bad guy down, they always stood with their fists up, waiting for the heavy to get back on his feet. I decided I was going to drag the bad guy to his feet and keep hitting him."

Eventually, Ford filmed multiple movies in Monument Valley. The Navajos named an iconic sandstone plateau for the director, and he and Wayne - and Josef, the man whose photographs made it possible are memorialized in Goulding's Lodge today.

THE MAN FROM BAVARIA often wore red. In self-portraits, as well as in photographs by Josef's wife, the writer Joyce Rockwood Muench. And, later, in portraits by Josef's son, landscape photographer David Muench.

The reason, David says, is because it's a powerful color one that stood out against the landscapes to which Josef was trying to pay tribute.

"From very early on, my father would put us all in red shirts," he remembers. "I remember doing fishing shots for him where I was in a red shirt. He had a very particular way he wanted us to stand, and I remember so clearly that he had a cable release for the shutter. He'd run and join our little grouping, or have someone else take the photo. The red shirt was something of a must. He felt that would sell the work."

Talk of those red shirts makes David laugh a little. There is, however, a more reflective discussion of those early years, when he accompanied his dad on countless photographic adventures. David, who is Arizona Highways' longest-serving contributor, says those journeys to Navajoland with his parents are among some of his most formative experiences.

"I traveled with him and my mother quite a bit in Monument Valley," David says. "We'd go out with the Navajos, and Harry would take food to them. This was just barely into the 1950s, and I'd change films for my father. It was all 4x5 and color.

"Let me make a statement with emphasis: It's not necessarily the camera which one uses that 'makes or breaks' a good picture, but that it is the person behind it who conceives with eyes and mind the end results, before pressing the shutter release."

We'd load them into folders, and it was a very hands-on learning experience for me. Still, I didn't think much of it until later."

More than anything, all of those experiences with the Navajos and, later, the Hopis and Apaches were an exercise in patience for both Josef and David. Many of Arizona's indigenous people are quiet, reserved. They're protective of their culture and their deeply spiritual heritage. Relationships, particularly with outsiders, can be slow to start.

Josef approached them with humility and decency. He didn't push to make photographs. Often, he would compensate his subjects for their time. Take advantage? Never.

"He learned the culture down deep," David says of his father. "He learned about sheepherding and how delicate it was to live on that land. His legacy, really, is in working early on with the Navajos and connecting the world to images of Monument Valley."

There was other work, too, of course. Photographs of Central Arizona's Mogollon Rim and Eastern Arizona's White Mountains as in those fishing photos David references. Of Southeastern Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains. Of California coastlines and Colorado's Dolores River Canyon.

And there is parallelism along with subtle (and not-sosubtle) variations in the work of Josef's son, David, and grandson, Marc. All three men have been published in these pages. All three men have an unflappable respect for horizons and stillness and the way photography is the art of bringing the Earth to its people.

And beyond: In 1977, Josef's work was launched into space as part of the "Golden Record." His photograph of a snowcovered sequoia in Kings Canyon National Park lives somewhere outside our solar system now, on the unmanned Voyager probes. It, along with 114 other images of the planet and greetings in many languages, might someday find its way to a galaxy far, far away. As of today, the two Voyager probes have communicated with the Deep Space Network for 42 years, and Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object from Earth. "Part of what he believed in was, always, looking around “There are so many different aspects in the Southwest that it is possible to spend a whole lifetime there devoted to photography. A careful study and a determination to find the best position, timing and all the rest, will lead you and your camera to increasingly satisfactory results, as well as a deepening appreciation for all that there is to see and to love in the desert.” the corner and exploring,” Marc says. “He spent so much time looking for images — for places — to photograph. He really was a pioneer.” Marc and Josef had only a brief relationship, but Marc’s grandfather’s work has profoundly influenced his own. He reiterates Josef’s inclination toward putting people in unusual places in the landscape.

“That was quite inspirational to me,” Marc says. “One I remember is the portrait of the Navajo in Monument Valley, looking down through the North [Window] or South Window. It’s black and white, and he has a branch of a juniper tree arch-ing over the composition in the foreground. That’s certainly one of the photographs that was inspirational to me.” Really, the idea of shooting through something seems hard-wired in the Muench family of photographers. It’s a concept David didn’t acknowledge or even think about, really, until just recently — as he was preparing for a project.

“Now that I see some of his older work, I see that I picked up framing distant subjects — the Mittens, Ship Rock, what have you — through something,” David says. “I have a hard time with the straight, wide-open landscape. I want to bring in a tree frame, or a rock, or something that leads to the dis-tant thing.”

And although Zandria Muench Beraldo, Marc’s sister and David’s daughter, doesn’t have too many memories of her grandfather — Josef died in 1998 — she, too, feels a sense of reverence for his work.

“I loved his photography of the Navajo people doing everyday things,” she says. “He was a treasure trove of history — most of his work can be seen at Northern Arizona University.” It’s an impressive collection that’s preserved at NAU’s Cline Library, in the careful hands of those biographers and archivists who linked his name to this magazine. It is documentation of the man from Bavaria’s growth as a photographer, as well as a chronicle of Arizona’s history. Of Arizona Highways’ history.

But if you ask David what his family’s photographic legacy is, there will be a quiet space of about 15 heartbeats. He will tell you that you should probably talk to someone else about it.

Humility. Patience.

“For me ... it was him teaching me a way to see,” he’ll say. “My dad and others started it really early in Arizona Highways. Ray Manley and Dad and others. They were the first ones working with a 4x5 and a tripod and bringing those land-scapes to the people. It was early. It set a pace — that idea of the “near/far.” You find natural connections at your feet; then you find the far-off. And you want both things to be sharp. You find something to draw your eye through the photograph.”

PARTING SHOT MARICOPA POINT BY ESTHER HENDERSON

In the 1950s, longtime Arizona Highways contributor Esther Henderson started writing and photographing Way Out West With Esther Henderson, a weekly feature for the Tucson Citizen. One of our favorite installments featured this photograph, which is titled Maricopa Point, from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

"Jay Gaza was just about the best photographic model we ever had," she wrote. "He was a wrangler on the mule trip down into the Canyon and, unlike a lot of other wranglers, he didn't try to typify the West - he just did.

"We never had to tell him how to stand, sit or lean; he always looked right. Only when you've worked with models do you understand how important a talent that is. At the Canyon, there was never light or time enough to do a lot of explaining. The fact that Jay 'melted' into natural position was the greatest advantage.

"Jay had his favorite mount, and while it took a little maneuvering to get this long-tailed fellow's cooperation, he, too, was a fine model - in Jay's hands. What we wanted wasn't so easy.

"Even a man's horse-sense tells him it's a long drop off the rim; a horse's horse-sense forbids him the rim. You wouldn't believe the number of appointments made and broken because of weather; time and again Jay galloped forth during his free time only to find too few or too many clouds over the location.

"On our third rendezvous this picture was taken just minutes before the storm broke; Jay galloped back to El Tovar in a driving rain. What price pictures? Plenty wet shirts." AH