Jack Dykinga
Photographer
Born 1943
For the past 100 years, Arizona Highways has had hundreds of contributors. But only one has a Pulitzer Prize: Jack Dykinga. That accolade, in 1971, was the result of “his dramatic and sensitive photographs at the Lincoln and Dixon State Schools for the Retarded in Illinois.” Dykinga created the series while on assignment for the Chicago Sun-Times.
His career in photojournalism was incredible, but in his time contributing to Arizona Highways, he’s become one of the deans of landscape photography. After relocating to Arizona, he worked for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson before leaving photojournalism in 1985. Three years before that, in November 1982, he made his debut in our pages — alongside the late Charles Bowden, who would become Dykinga’s friend and frequent creative collaborator. The piece, titled Ramsey Canyon: A Visit to an Unspoiled Land, featured nine of Dykinga’s photos.
“And lo and behold, up at Ramsey Canyon, I meet this abrasive, Fess Parker-looking guy,” Dykinga wrote in a 2019 tribute to Bowden in the Journal of the Southwest. “We circled each other like a couple of dogs peeing on a fire hydrant.”
In the more than 40 years since that first assignment, his work has appeared in these pages countless times.
“Jack Dykinga is a photographic dynamo who incorporates his journalistic roots into everything he shoots,” says Arizona Highways Photo Editor Jeff Kida. “All of Jack’s images come packaged with a story that allows viewers the ability to appreciate his work at a number of different levels. While he jokes about his success being the result of a 60-year apprenticeship, his work ethic is unparalleled. His photography has always been and continues to be the stuff most photographers aspire to.”
And not even a double lung transplant and double heart bypass in 2014 could threaten that. He survived, he recovered, and he wandered again into the desert to shoot. Sunrises. Sunsets. Saguaros. A family of burrowing owls.
“There are now five chicks in this burrow,” Dykinga told Matt Jaffe for the writer’s 2021 profile of the artist, It’s Time You Got to Know Jack. “They’ve been out for two days. Burrowing owls are 6 inches tall, but they punch way above their weight and think they’re eagles. They have a lot of attitude, and I have a special affinity for this group. This is the counterpoint to all the ugly stuff in life. You have to have that for yourself. It’s a refuge for the soul.”
As are Mr. Dykinga’s images for ours.
— Kelly Vaughn
Arizona Highways inaugural Hall of Fame Inductees