When I was young, I spent many a summer afternoon exploring the yard of our neighbors, Paul and Mary Bauer. They owned an undeveloped lot—a rarity in suburban Washington, DC—that never failed to provide entertainment for a child who loved the outdoors, whether it was digging for dinosaur bones and fossils (I never found any), collecting rocks and bird feathers, or catching turtles, salamanders, and snakes. On rainy days I sometimes went inside the retired couple’s home to play Chinese checkers or to build something in Mr. Bauer’s basement workshop. On other occasions I would sit on their living room floor and flip through stacks of Arizona Highways, mesmerized by pictures of desert scenery and Native American artifacts. The Bauers’ friends—former National Park Service director Arthur Demaray and his wife, who in the 1930s built the house where I grew up—had retired to the Grand Canyon state some years before and Paul and Mary had maintained a subscription to the popular tourist magazine ever since. Reading William Wyckoff’s latest book, Riding Shotgun with Norman Wallace, brought back childhood memories of Arizona Highways, and Arizona, a state I would not visit until I was an adult.
So who is Norman Wallace and why was the author tagging along with him on a journey across the forty-eighth state? Originally from Cincinnati, Wallace was a junior studying engineering at Ohio State University in 1905 when he ventured west, seeking practical field experience. According to Wyckoff, he never looked back. For twenty-five years he worked primarily as a railroad surveyor, traveling to remote corners of the West before ultimately settling in Arizona. Although he enjoyed the routine, living and working outdoors for extended periods of time with a survey crew, there was no job security. During long stretches when no work was available, he devoted time to his true love—photography. Using a simple Kodak Box camera at first and then graduating to more technically sophisticated equipment, he made images of the physical and cultural landscapes he encountered on his road trips. Then, as the Great Depression worsened and he found himself laid off again—this time by the Southern Pacific Railroad—“Wallace’s career took a major turn that shaped the rest of his professional life and thrust him into a more prominent position in both transforming and recording the Arizona landscape he had come to love” (p. 5). Hired to work on the construction of U.S. 66 near Flagstaff, Wallace spent the next twenty-three years in the employ of the Arizona Highway Department, rising to the level of chief location engineer. More significantly, he began to chronicle—both visually and in written form—the work of the highway department, the beauty of the Arizona desert, and the myriad ways a growing population and a booming economy were transforming his adopted home. His reputation as a photographer attracted the attention of higher-ups who used his images in official documents, and then, later, enlisted him to publish photos and write stories for the department’s nationally renowned Arizona Highways.
As you might have guessed by now, Wyckoff was not actually riding with Wallace as he conducted research for this book. Rather, he was following in the peripatetic road surveyor’s footsteps; in his exact footsteps if possible. Using repeat photography as a mechanism to study landscape transformation in Arizona over the past century, Wyckoff needed a collection of images to serve as a basis of comparison for his contemporary photographs. Having unearthed Wallace’s photos and log books in 2010 while researching a different project at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson, Wyckoff knew he had stumbled on a gold mine. When he returned to Tucson four years later, he set to work selecting images for comparison and deciphering Wallace’s cryptic notes and cataloging system. Armed with the perceptive eye and adventurous spirit of a veteran geographer—and fortified by a stash of M&Ms on the floor of the backseat of his car—Wyckoff crisscrossed the state in an effort to represent the broad sweep of Arizona’s physical and cultural landscapes, but also the breadth of images in Wallace’s collection. Drawing on his extensive knowledge and understanding of the U.S. West, he offers critical insights into both sets of images and yet, with characteristic humility, he invites us to examine these “visual parables” ourselves and to “draw our own conclusions about what these paired experiences mean” (p. 2).
Wyckoff organizes the book into eight chapters and galleries. He begins with a brief biography of Wallace that introduces the reader to the talents and proclivities of the itinerant civil engineer cum photographer. The remaining chapters are designated according to themes that emerged from the author’s survey of the collection. Where “Nature’s Palette” and “Monuments to History” reveal Wallace’s love for Arizona’s stunning natural beauty and unique cultural heritage, including a reverence for Native American ruins and Spanish architecture, “Mining’s Mark” captures his fascination for the industrial sublime, whether the subject is a mining headframe, a smelter belching smoke, or a sprawling mine town. “Small Towns” transports us back in time to a period when federal government projects and extractive industries sparked a boom in commercial and residential development in some of the more remote parts of the state. In “Mother Road,” Wallace follows U.S. 66 as it snakes across the state, bisecting treeless plateaus, vast open plains, and bustling boomtowns. “Urban Arizona” gives us a glimpse of what is to come, as it records early growth of cities that would soon explode in population. Finally, “Far Corners” offers an eclectic mix of images that depict sights and scenes along Arizona’s borders, from Wolf Hole to Navajo Bridge to Nogales.
In each gallery, Wallace’s pictures are cast opposite Wyckoff’s repeat shots. The images—both old and new—have an alluring quality about them. I found myself studying the pairings closely, searching for markers—a building, a fence post, a natural feature—that had withstood the passage of time. Sometimes the changes were subtle. For example, the main highway between Springerville and St. Johns appears to have changed very little between 1933 and 2017 (pp. 32–33). It remains unpaved and there is no sign of development clear to the horizon. In other cases, the differences are hard to miss, as in the case of the ruins of a major operation at the Tom Reed Gold Mine (pp. 64–65) or the once-thriving community at Ruby reduced to abandoned buildings and tailings (pp. 68–69). In some instances, the differences between the two images are truly disorienting, such as the ones depicting Sedona in 1939 and 2017 (pp. 96–97). In each case, one cannot help but marvel at Wyckoff’s ability to locate Wallace’s precise camera angle, especially when it meant dodging modern-day two-way traffic.
What are we to make of the author’s “friendship” with Norman Wallace and this remarkable collection of before and after photographs? Although Wyckoff clearly established a bond with Wallace—and no doubt felt his presence as he literally stood in his footsteps—it is also clear he could not turn back the clock and that he did, in fact, spend countless hours on the road alone. To be sure, Wallace’s evocative photographs, detailed log books, and the “gravely twang” emanating from an oral history cassette recording, offered Wyckoff a unique lens through which to view and interpret the past and, by extension, understand and appreciate the present. Perhaps singer-songwriter Bob Dylan said it best: “But all the while I was alone,” he once wrote, “The past was close behind.” So it seems with Wyckoff and Wallace. As for the photographs, Wallace and Wyckoff, together, show us that the desert Southwest surely has changed over the past 100 years. Jack Burns—the mysterious horseman who rides across several of Edward Abbey’s novels—doubtless would grieve the loss of open space and freedom that Arizonans have traded for comfort and convenience. Yet, many of the photographs displayed in the galleries offer contradictory narratives—the ability of cultural landscapes to survive and flourish, and nature’s capacity to endure and recover. Wyckoff’s advice to readers, “Feel free to write your own captions” (p. 18), speaks to the abundance and complexity of themes one is likely to discover turning the pages of this wondrous book.
The gallery photographs themselves are beautifully reproduced and displayed, but the design and layout of the book also deserve mention, particularly the cover and frontispiece. The image used for the cover is a montage of the photographs featured in Gallery 41, “Ascending Sitgreaves Pass,” the original taken by Wallace in 1933 and its modern companion by Wyckoff in 2016. Likewise the frontispiece, which combines the old and the new versions of “West of Springerville” depicted in Gallery 5 and taken in 1933 and 2017, respectively. In both cases, the pictures are fused together seamlessly, transitioning gradually and gracefully from faded black and white to color. The effect sets the tone for the rest of the volume, which is as attractive as it is illuminating.
Finally, we might consider what the author took away from the experience of writing this book. In the concluding epilogue, Wyckoff states, “Norman taught me how it pays to look carefully, to think about what you see, and in the end to make it part of who you are” (p. 166). He is being generous. Although I do not question that he learned a lot riding shotgun with Norman Wallace, Wyckoff has spent his entire career looking carefully, thinking about what he is seeing, and communicating his thoughts in prose that is rich and refreshing, much to the benefit and delight of his readers. Maybe one day some plucky young scholar will have the presence of mind and good fortune to hop in a car and ride shotgun with William Wyckoff.