Riding Shotgun With Norman Wallace

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.

2021 Southwest Books of the Year 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.

A sharp examination of Arizona by a nationally acclaimed writer, Rim to River follows Tom Zoellner on a 790-mile walk across his home state as he explores key elements of Arizona culture, politics, and landscapes. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about a vibrant and baffling place.

Postcards from the Baja California Border uses popular historical imagery--the vintage postcard--to tell a compelling, visually enriched geographical story about the border towns of Baja California.

In the southwestern corner of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on the border between Arizona and Mexico, one finds Quitobaquito, the second-largest oasis in the Sonoran Desert. There, with some effort, one might also find remnants of once-thriving O’odham communities and their predecessors with roots reaching back at least 12,000 years—along with evidence of their expulsion, the erasure of their past, attempts to recover that history, and the role of the National Park Service (NPS) at every layer. The outlines of the lost landscapes of Quitobaquito—now further threatened by the looming border wall—reemerge in Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis as Jared Orsi tells the story of the land, its inhabitants ancient and recent, and the efforts of the NPS to “reclaim” Quitobaquito’s pristine natural form and to reverse the damage done to the O’odham community and culture, first by colonial incursions and then by proponents of “preservation.” Quitobaquito is ecologically and culturally rich, and this book summons both the natural and human history of this unique place to describe how people have made use of the land for some five hundred generations, subject to the shifting forces of subsistence and commerce, tradition and progress, cultural and biological preservation. Throughout, Orsi details the processes by which the NPS obliterated those cultural landscapes and then subsequently, as America began to reckon with its colonial legacy, worked with O’odham peoples to restore their rightful heritage. Tracing the building and erasing of past landscapes to make some of them more visible in the present, Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis reveals how colonial legacies became embedded in national parks—and points to the possibility that such legacies might be undone and those lost landscapes remade.

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is an internationally known feature of the North American landscape, attracting more than five million visitors each year. A deep cultural, visual, and social history has shaped the Grand Canyon’s environment into one of America’s most significant representations of nature. Yet the canyon is more than a vacation destination, a movie backdrop, or a scenic viewpoint; it is a real place as well as an abstraction easily summoned in the minds of Americans. The Grand Canyon, or the idea of it, is woven into the fabric of American cultural identity and serves as a cultural reference point—an icon. In Framing Nature Yolonda Youngs traces the idea of the Grand Canyon as an icon and the ways people came to know it through popular imagery and visual media. She analyzes and interprets more than fourteen hundred visual artifacts, including postcards, maps, magazine illustrations, and photographs of the Grand Canyon, supplemented with the words and ideas of writers, artists, explorers, and other media makers from 1869 to 2022. Youngs considers the manipulation and commodification of visual representations and shifting ideas, values, and meanings of nature, exploring the interplay between humans and their environments and how visual representations shape popular ideas and meanings about national parks and the American West. Framing Nature provides a novel interpretation of how places, especially national parks, are transformed into national and environmental symbols.

The early history of photography in America coincided with the Euro-American settlement of the West. This thoughtful book argues that the rich history of western photography cannot be understood by focusing solely on the handful of well-known photographers whose work has come to define the era. Art historian Rachel Sailor points out that most photographers in the West were engaged in producing images for their local communities. These pictures didn’t just entertain the settlers but gave them a way to understand their new home. Photographs could help the settlers adjust to their new circumstances by recording the development of a place—revealing domestication, alteration, and improvement. The book explores the cultural complexity of regional landscape photography, western places, and local sociopolitical concerns. Photographic imagery, like western paintings from the same era, enabled Euro-Americans to see the new landscape through their own cultural lenses, shaping the idea of the frontier for the people who lived there.

Essays by photographers, critics, and philosophers.