Esther Henderson
Photographer
1911–2008
Esther Henderson arrived in Arizona at the end of a winding journey that began in her native Illinois and included time in New York City as a cabaret dancer. Having promised her father that she’d change careers before turning 25, she learned commercial photography and portraiture. But when she got to Tucson in 1935, she recalled decades later, “It didn’t take long to find that I had already made the first mistake: choosing a business that would keep me in a darkroom after I had come to a land of sunlight.”
Thus, she augmented her studio work with landscape photography, and her work in that discipline caught the eye of Arizona Highways Editor Raymond Carlson, who stopped by her Tucson studio in search of scenic photos. At the time, Carlson was beginning the magazine’s transition to a publication focused on travel and tourism. Ultimately, Henderson’s photos became the first Carlson ever purchased for the magazine.
Soon after that, Henderson married fellow photographer Chuck Abbott, and while they both contributed extensively to the magazine for decades, Henderson had the most ambition and the keenest photographic eye. With their two sons in tow, the couple ventured all over the American West, first via tent camping and later in a 19-foot Aljoa trailer.
Henderson’s photos of the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and other well-known Arizona destinations helped make the magazine renowned around the world. She often included a human subject in her images — one of her most famous, from our March 1954 cover, shows a horse and its cowboy, a wrangler named Jay Gaza, peering into the Canyon from the South Rim. That practice was in keeping with what Henderson called “a never-ending search” to interpret the Southwest’s majesty in human terms.
“For all its challenges, my Southwest has its rewards,” she added in a 1968 retrospective. “There is no land so wide, so empty of people, so full of promise.”
— Noah Austin
Arizona Highways inaugural Hall of Fame Inductees