Carlos Elmer
Photographer
1920–1993
It’s not quite the Ansel Adams Wilderness — a section of California’s Sierra Nevada that honors another Arizona Highways Hall of Fame inductee — but Carlos Elmer’s Joshua View, an unassuming slope along Pierce Ferry Road north of Kingman, puts Elmer in the minuscule club of Arizona Highways contributors who’ve had a geographical feature officially named after them. At that spot and others in the area, the writer and photographer made countless photos of Joshua trees, an enduring subject of his work.
Kingman wasn’t Elmer’s birthplace — he arrived there from Washington, D.C., as a boy — but it was his hometown. In our May 1962 issue, he recalled his childhood of reading comic books at Route 66’s Hotel Beale, which was owned by his grandmother. Later, his interests grew to include more of Northwestern Arizona — a place where, he noted, a person often could go sunbathing at Lake Mohave in the morning, have a snowball fight in the Hualapai Mountains in the afternoon and be back in Kingman in time for dinner.
Equally skilled as a writer and photographer, Elmer quickly established himself as an Arizona Highways regular after his photos from Havasu Canyon appeared in our June 1940 issue. And over the next half-century, he pursued his craft while working first as a civilian U.S. Navy employee and later in instrumentation sales. He published his first book, Carlos Elmer’s Arizona, in 1967, and eight more books followed. And his photos and firsthand accounts of Lake Mead, the Colorado River and other destinations helped to publicize a relatively little-visited corner of the state.
Appropriately, Elmer’s last writing contribution to Arizona Highways, published posthumously in February 1994, was paired with his photo of Joshua trees near an old corral on the way to Grand Canyon West. “He was an extraordinary friend of this magazine,” Editor Bob Early wrote, “and will be greatly missed.”
— Noah Austin
Arizona Highways inaugural Hall of Fame Inductees