Riding Shotgun with Norman Wallace: Rephotographing the Arizona Landscape

By William Wyckoff

In Riding Shotgun with Norman Wallace, award-winning geographer William Wyckoff celebrates the photographic legacy of Norman Grant Wallace, whose work as an Arizona highway engineer during the first half of the twentieth century afforded him the opportunity to survey every corner of the Grand Canyon State. Possessing a passion for photography, Wallace documented Arizona throughout his travels. From 1906 to 1969 Wallace photographed the state’s natural and rural landscapes; its burgeoning infrastructure including roads, bridges, and dams; and its towns and cities, some of which experienced exponential growth following World War II.

Nearly one hundred years later, Wyckoff retraces Wallace’s southwestern travels using the engineer’s photographs and meticulous notebooks as a guide. The author rephotographs many of Wallace’s iconic vantage points, giving us a historical tour of Arizona, a “then-and-now” viewpoint that also tells the personal story of Wyckoff’s own vicarious travels with Wallace through Arizona’s vast countryside and its urban centers and small towns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780826361424

William Wyckoff

William Wyckoff is a professor emeritus of geography in the Department of Earth Sciences at Montana State University. He is the author of several books, including Riding Shotgun with Norman Wallace: Rephotographing the Arizona Landscape (UNM Press).

Book preview

1

MEETING NORMAN WALLACE

Norman Wallace on the hills above Superior, Arizona, undated. Photo reproduced courtesy of the Arizona Historical Society (hereafter AHS), PC180, Folder 256, #A.

Follow his eye. Let him raise the camera and frame a scene. The town below, the smelter stack beyond, and the road running at an angle across the bottom of the view. Hold steady, make a slight adjustment, catch a touch more sky with the horizon gently dipping away from the stack. Take a photograph. Maybe another. The man facing away from us, Norman Wallace, camera in hand, repeated that simple act thousands of times across Arizona between 1906—when he arrived in the territory—and his death in 1983.

Decades later, my adventures in Arizona became wedded to Wallace’s. My perfect day became standing where he stood and peering into my Canon viewfinder, often perched on unstable slopes and grabbing at saguaros for support, then watching the smokestack align, altering the zoom just a touch to catch the same sweep of hills on the horizon, and getting a distant roof—its tiny trapezoidal shape—to sit just above the road in my view. I knew what that simple positional truth proclaimed: that I stood within a foot or two of where Norman had stood seventy-eight years earlier; that in a small but visceral way I shared a part of his day, a view, an idea for a picture of this place, that same alignment of bushes, highway, streets, and sky.

I found that repeat photography (the act of retaking an image from the same vantage and under as similar conditions as possible at a later point in time) taught me so much about how the landscape of Arizona had changed between Norman’s time and mine. Sometimes the changes were predictable, but often there would be a curve ball—a shack on Tucson’s west side that still stood ninety years later or a tree in a remote valley near Nogales that had stubbornly survived to stare me down, just as it did Norman. In addition to understanding how landscapes change—or sometimes don’t—I also came to know Norman better and better, at least the part of himself he left in his photographs. Like all of us he was a complicated human being, rich with contradictions—a man of his time, a man more of images than words, a man who seamlessly mingled his work life (he was a civil engineer who surveyed rail lines and highways) with his artistic life. I found that I enjoyed exploring what he enjoyed exploring—Arizona’s amazingly rugged terrain; its plethora of wondrous, exotic vegetation; the visual presence of geological time in colored, layered rock; the spare beauty embodied in Native-crafted stone walls; small towns that drew his gaze; bustling urban boulevards in Tucson and Phoenix; or the linear, engineered aesthetics of highways laid across the luminous Arizona landscape.

This book visually shares my travels with Norman—the delight of riding along with him down some dusty byway for miles, scampering up a hill that showed promise as I peered at one of his old photographs, pacing, cursing, watching how slopes, or maybe a fence or a human structure, finally look back at me, finding the same flat, rusty-red rock he had seen at this precise spot decades earlier. I wish Norman could have known how much pleasure he gave me in moments where I instantaneously learned something—both about him and about the landscape we momentarily shared. The galleries that follow offer only a fraction of Norman’s take on Arizona, but they represent well the sweetly parochial nature of his own character, the tireless energy that compelled him to make pictures of a land he dearly loved, and also the considerable talent he developed as a photographer.

Hopefully you can share the same surprise and fascination I found in revisiting these places and draw your own conclusions about what these paired experiences mean. More than anything, let these visual parables draw you into the landscapes of Arizona, into the landscapes that fascinated both Norman and me, and let them lead you into wonder at how that world—in Arizona and beyond—became at once so beautiful, so confounding, so ephemeral, and so enduring. Norman learned all those lessons. They are in his photographs, and they are in the ones I created later, following in his footsteps.

Norman Wallace and His Visual Legacy

Norman Wallace was making images of Arizona with a simple Kodak Box camera almost as soon as he arrived in the territory in 1906.¹ A native son of Cincinnati, Wallace left an engineering program at Ohio State University in 1905 during his junior year to get some practical surveying experience out West. He never went back. After road-construction work in Yellowstone National Park, he knocked around eastern Oregon, working that winter as a draftsman on a rail-line-construction crew. The following year he remained in the West, and he was attracted to the warmer climes of Tucson. The photo hobby was a natural for Norman: his father—an accountant by profession—had been an amateur photographer in Ohio, and as Norman got to know the Southwest, he readily picked up the habit. Later in life his wife, Henrietta, recalled that Norman always had a camera wherever he traveled and that he was married to his cameras before he was married to me. And, she admitted, much of that romance continued even after Norman