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From News To Nature

A landscape great turns his eye on the Grand Canyon

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Even Jack Dykinga, a veteran explorer of the Grand Canyon, was surprised to find lush greenery surrounding the rim rocks after what had been a particularly long rainy season. This view is near Swamp Point.

First, Jack Dykin> ga won the Pulitzer Prize, and then he found his calling. As a young photographer in the 1960s and ’70s, he used the gritty streets of Chicago as his background to photograph the news. Trading skyscrapers for the wide-open desert, Dykinga has become one of the most respected landscape photographers working today.

The force driving Dykinga is the same as when he covered daily news. He uses what he sees from behind the lens to bring about change. When he won the Pulitzer in 1971 while working at the Chicago Sun-Times, he helped expose the poor conditions of state-run hospitals caring for mentally handicapped children. His work helped to get the state to deliver more funding and make improvements. With that same spirit, he has turned his attention from people to places for the last 30 years, hoping to inspire within others the same deep sense of connection that he feels to the land surrounding him.

Using a photojournalistic, documentary-style approach, Dykinga makes large-format landscape photographs that focus on environmental issues in North America. His latest book, Images: Jack Dykinga’s Grand Canyon, shows the much-photographed landmark in a fresh light by concentrating on some of the more obscure viewpoints, like the Kaibab National Forest, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, areas managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Navajo Nation and Hualapai Indian Reservation.

North Canyon Rapid at the confluence of North and Marble canyo

“I had been inside the canyon, but I hadn’t ever made it all the way around,” Dykinga recalls. “So I was there photographing on speculation.”

Though the photographs represent some 35 sites, there are a couple of images that pulled the trigger to really get the book moving. After a particularly rainy season, Dykinga went to the Grand Canyon and was surprised to see hillsides that reminded him more of South America than the eroded layers of rock that epitomize the gorge.

“This was a really wet time of the year,” he explains. “It looked very ‘un-canyon like’—lush and covered with greenery—and reminded me of the jungles in Venezuela. It was so out of character for this area, and that’s what started the project going.”

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