Jerry Jacka
Photographer
1934–2017
Jerry Jacka’s parents drove west from Chicago in a Ford Model A in the spring of 1929, finding the desert awash in wildflowers and beauty. With a tent and a few essentials, they began the long, slow process of homesteading 640 acres on the banks of the New River wash, setting saguaro skeletons into the rock and caliche to mark corners and burning the barbed bodies of teddy bear chollas to clear them from the land.
“Living on an Arizona homestead in the early 1930s was an arduous task which demanded days of back-breaking labor and scraping out a living by any possible means,” Jacka wrote in his 2011 book, Sun-Up Ranch: An Arizona Desert Homestead. “It was a tough life which demanded a sturdy pioneer spirit, a strong work ethic (and body), perseverance and fortitude.”
Born in July 1934, Jacka spent his formative years wandering the desert near his home, finding arrow points, grinding stones and other remnants of the Hohokam people who once inhabited the area. He went to school in a one-room schoolhouse, where he met his future wife, Lois, and learned to play the accordion. And then, in 1953, a man named Kermit Sanders posted an advertisement. He was hiring someone to go door to door in Phoenix to sell portrait packages for babies. Jacka got the gig, and a few years later, to further support his and Lois’ growing family, he became a deputy in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, all the while continuing to make photographs and quietly submit them to Arizona Highways.
In July 1958, his first photograph appeared in our pages. It was, in his words, a “god-awful shot of the Painted Desert,” made on his honeymoon. Over the decades that followed, he became a regular and frequent contributor to the magazine and eventually became Arizona Highways’ go-to photographer for shots of Indian art and artifacts. It was his consideration of detail that made him a great photographer. But it was his gentle persistence, his kindness and his humility that opened doors for him, particularly after his celebrated “pottery issue” in February 1974.
“The Hopis, the Navajos, they’re no different from you and me,” he told me for an article published in 2010. “The biggest bit of wisdom we learned from all of our time with them was respect. We respected them, and they respected us. We made some beautiful friendships.”
— Kelly Vaughn
Arizona Highways inaugural Hall of Fame Inductees