PORTFOLIO

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS' LATEST BOOK TIMELESS I m a g e s

In celebration of the magazine's 65th anniversary, Arizona Highways has published a retrospective collection of photographs that have appeared in these pages. Some are historic. Some are noteworthy not only for their content but also for the lifetime achievements of the photographer. But all are timeless, classic images. This excerpt and portfolio offer a glimpse. The book, Timeless Images, written by Robert C. Dyer and photo-edited by J. Peter Mortimer, is available from Arizona Highways, 2039 West Lewis Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85009; (602) 258-1000 or 1 (800) 543-5432.

Massive natural forces at work, sometimes in violent collision with one another, sometimes in peaceful transition, have thrust and carved and shaped the landforms that man has circumscribed arbitrarily and called Arizona. Subterranean fury created the mountains and high plateaus. Canyons were carved by water and sculpted by wind. Rocky debris was milled down to sand and soil; trees and plants sprang from seed and reproduced. Portraying and preserving these vast and varied scenes of Arizona, along with remarking on the role of man in his chosen environment, has been and continues to be the special mission of Arizona Highways magazine. Through photographic images created by photographers with a particular affection for this land, Arizona Highways has, during 65 years of publication, amassed a treasury to lavish on those who share that affection. One of the first on the impressive roster of contributing photographers developed by former Editor Raymond Carlson is Josef Muench. Others in that elite group of "founding individuals" were Esther Henderson, Ray Manley, Ansel Adams, Carlos Elmer, Chuck Abbott, Hubert Lowman, Herb and Dorothy Mclaughlin, Barry Goldwater, Joseph McGibbeny, Wayne Davis, Norman G. Wallace, and perhaps a few others. Individualists all, they nonetheless shared a vision at a time and place that was propitious to the development of the magazine. In turn, the magazine and its editor provided an outlet for the work of those photographers, appreciative of their best and demanding better. It was a synergistic relationship that resulted in a fantastic growth in circulation and readership and a worldwide fame unmatched by any publication of similar purpose and scope. It was Editor Raymond Carlson, who, back in those early years, placed photography on a pedestal where it remains today. "Photography is an art," he wrote, "an important art which our own decades have done so much to perfect, an art which has added much to the broad field of culture. Photography is the medium that we use in this publication each month to bring you the absorbing story of Arizona and the Southwest."