EDITOR'S LETTER

A Focus on Photography
The bar is way up there somewhere. Right where Mr. Carlson left it in 1971. Although we’ve published some impressive words and photographs since he left, we still live in the shadow of our editor emeritus. Raymond Carlson.

When he showed up in the 1930s, the magazine was an acquired taste. However, he knew what was missing. “How can we,” he wrote in July 1938, “through the medium of black and white, paint a picture of the gold in an Arizona sunset, portray the blue of an Arizona sky, tell the fiery red and green of an Arizona desert in bloom? We therefore resort to color photography in this issue’s cover page to faithfully portray one colorful portion of the state.”

That shot — a shot of Oak Creek Canyon by Norman Wallace — was the first-ever color photograph in the magazine. It was our humble beginning. A single photo that would turn into tens of thousands of photos renowned around the world. Metaphorically, Arizona Highways is the Little Colorado River, which begins as a single drop in a nondescript spring in the White Mountains and becomes a rushing river that runs for 338 miles to the depths of the Grand Canyon. As rivers go, it’s one of our most important. Here’s how Mr. Carlson described it in his September 1965 column:

The Little Colorado is a “little” river but truly the “mightiest” little river of them all. In its short career from its birthplace in the high White Mountains to where it joins the big Colorado and loses its identity, it is a hodgepodge of moods and manners. It is many rivers to many people. To some it is a placid trout stream, murmuring its placid way through cool pine forests and beflowered mountain meadows. To others it is a life-giving stream whose precious waters nurture farms and orchards. Scores of ranchers bless it for watering their cattle and sheep. To others it can be a fearful stream, running wide in flood-stage, so thick with silt it seems as if it were intent on washing half of Northern Arizona into the sea.

It’s a coincidence that we’re featuring the Little Colorado River exactly 50 years after Mr. Carlson made it our cover story in 1965. The inspiration this time around came from Bill Hatcher, who had been photographing the river’s headwaters. He’d just moved back to Arizona, after living in Australia for four years, and was in the backcountry reconnecting with the state. In the process, he started sharing some of his images with us. Wow. Look at that. Spectacular. Those were the reactions in our photo department, so we sent Bill out to shoot the rest of the river for this month’s cover story. It was a few weeks later when we realized that the Little Colorado was our cover story in September 1965.

While the subject is the same, the stories are different, and the covers were shot at opposite ends of the river. In 1965, we featured the headwaters — Wayne Davis made the photograph in the Mount Baldy Primitive Area with a 4x5 Linhof camera. This month, we went with a Jack Dykinga photo of the river as it approaches the Grand Canyon. He used a Nikon D800E.

Jack will tell you that equipment is important, but there’s a lot more to it. Chuck Abbott, one of Mr. Carlson’s favorites, said the same thing in a September 1955 story titled You’ve Got to Go Back to Get the Good Ones. In the piece, he shared his thoughts on the art of photography and the challenges that come with it. The best part of the story, however, is the personal stuff, especially the anecdotes about his wife, Esther Henderson. Like her husband, Ms. Henderson was a world-renowned photographer and longtime contributor to Arizona Highways.

This month, as part of our annual Photography Issue, we’re rerunning the story. It’s a good read that offers a glimpse into the life of a landscape photographer in the middle of the last century. Many things have changed since then, but not the long hours spent in remote corners of the state. Peter Coskun knows what that’s like.

Peter was the winner of our recent photo contest. We don’t see a lot of stuff from the Kofa Mountains — it’s one of the most rugged ranges in the Southwest — so we were impressed with Peter’s hustle, and even more impressed with his photograph. In Best Picture 2015, you’ll see why. You’ll also see some of the runners-up, which were selected from a collection of more than 5,000 entries. Although we’ll always toil in the shadow of our editor emeritus, I think Mr. Carlson would appreciate the range of photographers we feature every month. Bill Hatcher, Jack Dykinga, Peter Coskun ... we’ve come a long way since that first color photo by Norman Wallace in 1938.
 

COMING IN OCTOBER ...
Our annual portfolio of autumn leaves, and a special collection of images by the 5-year-old son of a National Geographic photographer.