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Chasing the Perfect Picture

Before Air-conditioning or Freeways, This Tiny Woman Slogged through the Hinterlands Photographing Arizona's Remote Landscapes Fifty years ago, lugging about 40 pounds of photographic equipment, Esther Henderson crisscrossed Arizona. She walked its deserts, hiked its mountains. She traveled its paved roads and dirt tracks. And she took pictures, pieces of pure beauty, which still can cause a contemporary photographer to marvel.

"It's as nice as the day she shot it," says Peter Mortimer as he studies a Henderson photograph of storm clouds gathering over Mission San Xavier del Bac. A photographer and photographic editor who has seen his fair share of Arizona roads, Mortimer, a former Highways picture editor, chose to include this and other Henderson photographs in the recently published Timeless Images from Arizona Highways.

(ABOVE) Esther Henderson took this photograph on Mount Lemmon, northeast of Tucson, about 40 years ago. (LEFT) The photographer and her husband, Chuck Abbott, needed a station wagon to haul all of their camera equipment around the state. (OPPOSITE PAGE) Henderson shot "Flood Stage" in Oak Creek Canyon near Sedona.

His enthusiasm carries over to a 1942 Henderson photograph of a Mexican woman sitting by a vine-covered wall. "It's a masterpiece in lighting," he says. For Arizona photographer James Tallon, Henderson is to be thought of, "not so much as a photographer but as an artist with a camera." He first met her in

Taken on Pleasant Street in Prescott in 1968, "Remembrances of Times Past" (LEFT) recalls Henderson's Midwestern childhood. (RIGHT) Henderson captured this image of Mission San Xavier del Bac near Tucson in 1942. (BELOW) Before she became a photographer, Henderson was a dancer, and what she learned on stage she applied to her new career. MURRAY KORMAN In the 1950s on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. She was, he recalls, chasing clouds. "She was a cloud person."

The description is correct, but the tense is wrong. Esther Henderson is a cloud person and a flower person and a snow person and the other elements of Nature she pursued in search of the perfect picture. The hunt may be over, but for Henderson, now 80 years old and living in Santa Cruz, California, the memories remain keen.

"It was primitive," she says of the Arizona she began photographing in the 1930s. She speaks of the roads, washboard rough or so deep in dust tumbleweeds had to be shoved under the car wheels for traction. And there were the other so-called roads that turned into mud rivers when it rained. There often were no roads of any description into the places a photographer had to go. According to Henderson, only the powerfully motivated ever got to Canyon de Chelly. "And Monument Valley, boy, I couldn't go there alone." But she went where she had to. She was 25, 5 feet 2, and 105 pounds of pure tenacity. She also had the hunger. "I was interested in doing anything for anyone, anywhere, to get going." Photography hadn't been her first choice as a career. She had studied music and was a dancer in New York. It was a promise she made to her father that She would leave show business after five years that led her to photography. There never seemed to be a question of whether she had the eye, the talent for it. After all, she felt, isn't photography about light and line? And she knew about those things from dancing. After two short photography courses, she made the trip west with her father. When the rain stopped so did they. They had reached Arizona. She opened a portrait studio in Tucson, and her father began giving away her pictures, literally. He told her not to worry. "It'll come back to you." Raymond Carlson wasn't about to refuse the paternal offer of "she'll go anywhere and take anything." As the editor of the relatively young Arizona Highways magazine, he needed pictures. Esther Henderson had them and was willing to go out and get more. She picked up her camera, her tripod,

In the early years, Henderson created many portraits, including one of an Indian named Awasu (ABOVE), who lived in California. (RIGHT) Jay Gazo and his mount became a key ingredient in Henderson's photograph of the Grand Canyon, shot in the spring of 1954. (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 8 AND 9) The old Doodlebug Ranch, photographed by Henderson in June, 1945, today is the site of Sedona's Poco Diablo Resort.

Continued from page 7 sky. It was there, says Henderson, she discovered the reality of starlight. She would see it often in the following years when the intrepid couple opened their bedrolls on a land so vast and empty there was no place to tie a protective canvas cover should they need one. A half-century later, she wrote in her memoirs, "It was light enough on a moonless night to distinguish the black outline of the mountains against the navy-blue sky." The moonlight of the Southwest also left its impression. She remembers its reflective brilliance being so powerful at Pearce Ferry she was forced to huddle under two army blankets and use a changing bag to change her film. Even a marriage of talents would not make photographing Arizona easy. There still was no air-conditioning, and "road" applied to any track headed in the right direction. Henderson and Abbott kept their film cool by parking their Ford "Woody" under the shade of a tree, if they could find one. There still were signs on the land that warned, "Carry water and make local inquiry." For the couple, that meant they carried not only their photographic supplies but also a bucket, rope, food, water, and extra gasoline.

At the end of one rough day, they arrived at the Teec Nos Pos trading post in the far northeast corner of the state to rest and resupply. No one was there, but there was a note on the door: "Gone to Durango; make yourself at home." "It was wonderful," Henderson says of her Arizona. So were the pictures. They were vivid with color: the reds of the canyons, the blue-white of the snow. And her black-and-whites were as finely etched as the land itself. But ask any true artist about his or her craft, and you can expect to hear a lament. "You cannot put in everything that's there the smell of it for one thing onto a 5-by-7 sheet of film," complains Henderson. "No matter what you do, it isn't as beautiful as Nature, as God, made it."

It was never easy. One assignment turned into a photographer's nightmare. The couple arrived at Nogales after weeks of work along the west coast of Mexico. At the border, they realized the guards intended to open their film boxes exposing their precious film. They went back and developed more than 100 sheets of black-and-white film in a hotel bathroom.

"I'll never forget that," she says. All day and into the night she developed film. There was no cooling, no way to control the light, and it was incredibly hot.

The result was the September 1942 Arizona Highways "Salute to Mexico," a stunning photographic study of that country. It included not only the west-coast pictures taken by the couple but photographs from a second trip to Mexico. In all, it represented a total of three months on 10,000 miles of road and one not-to-be-forgotten day and night in a hotel bathroom developing film.

New members were added to the Henderson-Abbott team in the 1940s, and what they lacked in experience they more than made up in willingness to help. There was the firstborn son, Carl. His job would be to carry the camera.

Then there was young son Mark. He had the lunches.

"I wouldn't have changed it at all," says Carl Abbott, reflecting on the photographic expeditions they made as a family.

Carl was a toddler when Henderson took the photograph "Storm Over the Canyon." It was on the South Rim. Carl was near, and Chuck had gone in search of a better position than the one his wife had chosen. Pregnant, Henderson sat and, as was her way, waited for the right light.

"And, as a matter of fact, Chuck didn't get anything, and I got a really good picture out of it, best picture I ever took." It probably didn't surprise her husband.

The photographer focused on the exuberance of a celebration (LEFT) in "July 4 Picnic in Sabino Canyon." (RIGHT) Henderson and ber family owned the mountain retreat in "Cabin in the Shadows," shot in Oak Creek Canyon in 1955. (BELOW) In the garden of ber California home, Henderson examines the Deardorff View Camera she preferred early in her career. MARC MUENCH In 1955 he wrote, "She alone can find a good picture vantage point while standing in the strip-shade of a saguaro, can back up to a picture-taking position until she hits a rock to sit on." Her favorite photograph is "The Brave Poppy," a single flower surviving in a mud-cracked landscape. It wasn't the shot she had set out to get. She was looking for the kind of flowerscape they had seen in 1941, poppies that were knee-deep at Picacho Peak, the acres of them at Bowie. But this was another year, and there were only a few die-hard poppies at Bowie, a sad spring. Still, she took her shot. "It had more meaning than any picture I ever took," she says of the lonely little flower. "Adversity; it conquered adversity." Henderson hasn't taken photographs professionally since 1985 but remains active in her community and her new career serving in the Salvation Army. Says son Carl, "She walks a little slower but still tends to walk faster than me." "It does go fast," she says of the passing years that included not only the death of Chuck but of Mark, the young boy who used to carry the lunches. He died in a surfing accident off the Santa Cruz coast. Walking with this woman along that coast, you realize just how tiny she is . . . and just how tough. "My father used to say, 'You're sufferin' some kind of wonderful,'" she says with a laugh after spending hours remembering the good and the rough times of her life. She's the lady who chased the flowers and clouds and snows of Arizona and just happened to shoot some magnificent pictures along the way.

Photography Retrospective: The finest photographs from the magazine's 65-year history are represented in Timeless Images from Arizona Highways. Included in the oversize hardcover book are early blackand-white images and full-color spreads by the magazine's award-winning photographers, along with comments by the contributors. In addition to pictures by Esther Henderson and others, the 126photograph collection also features rare color images by Ansel Adams. To order, call toll-free 1 (800) 543-5432. In the Phoenix area, call 258-1000.