Goldwater
the family photo album. The children were under strict orders never to touch it.
But Goldwater, ever the mechanically minded and insubordinate child, could not resist sneaking pictures of landscapes or from Native American trading posts his mother frequented during their trips around the state.
He apparently didn’t realize that the evidence would show up when his mother developed the film. But rather than punishing him, she marveled at his eye for his subject matter and encouraged him to continue.
Years later, Goldwater’s wife, Peggy, would give him a camera for their first Christmas. That gift would mark the birth of a legend.
Not the legend of the iconic senator, GOP presidential nominee and father of American conservatism, and not the legend of the Air Force Reserve pilot who flew missions over “The Hump” in World War II and learned how to fly more than 250 types of aircraft before retiring as a major general.
Rather, it was the birth of Barry Goldwater the photographer, whose work was so good that it led to a friendship with the great Ansel Adams and resulted in his admission as a fellow in the Royal London Photographic Society at age 32.
By the time he died in 1998 at the age of 89, Barry Goldwater would leave an archive of more than 15,000 images, a handful of cover photos in one of the world’s premier photo magazines and several coffee-table books. His visual legacy also includes a feature film documenting a historic trip down the Green and Colorado rivers in 1940, a time when only 73 others had successfully repeated the journey first undertaken by John Wesley Powell in 1869. Goldwater screened the film dozens of times across the state, which, he would later say, helped build the name recognition he would need to launch a political career.
A chance meeting, an idea, a tribute
Alison Goldwater shows a photograph taken by her grandfather Barry Goldwater. Alison Goldwater and her family are preparing to release an archive of photos taken by Barry Goldwater throughout his life, and have created a library and foundation to honor his legacy. Arizona Highways two years ago has helped push that dream down the road to reality.
The magazine will soon publish a special 100-page commemorative issue entirely dedicated to Goldwater’s photographic legacy. It will be one of the first steps toward ensuring that Goldwater’s work will be available to help future generations understand how one of America’s great political icons saw the people and places of his time.
‘A fine and eager amateur’
Where Goldwater fits in the pantheon of great photographers is a matter for discussion.
In the forward to one of Goldwater’s books, the great Western landscape photographer Ansel Adams noted that there is a clear distinction between a professional and an amateur, and “Barry Goldwater, is, in my opinion, a fine and eager amateur.”
He went on to say that “The important thing is that (Goldwater) made photographs of historical and interpretive significance, and for this, we should be truly grateful.”
Richard Nilsen, who served as the Arizona Republic’s arts critic from 1986 to 2012 and wrote about the senator’s photographic legacy, said Goldwater’s photographs have “tremendous historic value, particularly because he took them.”
He added, however, that they should be appreciated for their content rather than their aesthetics.
While artists like Adams and Edward Weston — whom Goldwater tried to emulate — saw light and shadow and shape and form in terms of art forms, Goldwater was more interested in who or what he was shooting.
His images of Native Americans show a “genuine empathy,” Nilsen said because Goldwater clearly saw them as real people.
But rather than creating his own aesthetic, which wouldn’t be expected of an amateur photographer, Goldwater “accepted the Arizona Highways look and proved he could deliver,” Nilsen said.
In fact, Goldwater had some 300 pictures published in Arizona Highways magazine, including one of its most famous cover shots, a photograph of two Navajo girls and their sheep in the snow.
That Dec. 26, 1946, issue also made history as Arizona Highways became the first magazine in the United States to ever be printed entirely in color.
Traveling every corner of the state
Stieve said the fact that Goldwater “shot a lot of things people had never seen before” is what makes his work so significant.
Goldwater traveled every corner of the state, and his relationships with Native Americans, many of whom he met while running a trading post on the Navajo reservation, gave him access to societies that are closed to most people.
“It was such an important time,” Stieve said. “Some of the ceremonies he documented don’t even exist anymore.”
In addition to his photographic abilities, Goldwater was also a “wonderful writer,” Stieve said.
The January 1941 issue, for instance, contains an 8,000-word account of Goldwater’s six-week journey down the Colorado, along with 70 photographs. Thirty years later, the text and photos would become the template for his book “Delightful Journey.”
A love and respect for the land
Goldwater’s work can be divided into two camps: people and places. Goldwater loved Arizona’s soaring landscapes, but he loved its native people even more.
One of his most famous photos is titled simply, “The Navajo,” a stark, black and white 1938 portrait of a Navajo elder named Charlie Potato that has hung in galleries around the world.
Another portrait, “Hopi Girl,” was shot in 1956 and shows a “little ball of fire” who repeatedly asked Goldwater to take her picture.
In a collection of photos published after Goldwater’s death in 1998, his son Michael wrote that some of his father’s Native American subjects “were strangers whose acquaintance he made through a haphazard introduction in the wilderness or during his tenure as a partner in Rainbow Lodge (trading post).
“As often they were childhood friends from the Phoenix Indian School, who welcomed him into their homes as a trusted friend,” he wrote in the forward to the collection.
Michael Goldwater said his father wrote in his second autobiography that he regarded Native Americans as his “kindred spirits.”
“After years of developing friendships, I began to understand Indian ways, needs and causes. They’ll always be my brothers and sisters,” the elder Goldwater wrote.
One of the things Goldwater shared with those brothers and sisters was a profound love and respect for the land.
In a 1966 interview, he noted that some Native American languages had no word for pollution because despoiling the land was inconceivable to them.
To look at Goldwater’s legislative record, the picture of him as an environmentalist might seem incongruous. The League of Conservation Voters gave him just 9 percent on its scorecard.
And while he voted in favor of the Clean Air Act, he abstained from voting on the Clean Water Act and turned thumbs down on the landmark Wilderness Act of 1964, which set aside more than 9 million acres of public lands where “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.”
Goldwater also voted in favor of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, which was widely opposed by conservationists.
The dam inundated one of the world’s most majestic geological features along with hundreds of prehistoric Native sites and effectively made it impossible for anyone to experience a trip like his 1940 journey down the Colorado.
Alison Goldwater said her grandfather regretted that vote more than any other in his 30-year Senate career.
Yet Goldwater was very much an environmentalist. He supported efforts to crack down on polluters, and he devoted half a chapter of his 1970 book, “Conscience of a Majority,” to the environment. He also helped lead the effort to limit building on Camelback Mountain.
But nowhere was his love for nature more evident than in his photography.
“He always said that if he had a mistress, it would be the Grand Canyon,” Alison said. “He wanted to show people the beauty that he found all around Arizona.”
Time, the enemy of film
Two of the biggest impediments to preserving Goldwater’s photographic legacy are money and time.
Alison Goldwater formed the Barry and Peggy Goldwater Foundation with the purpose of digitizing his 15,000 images, and earlier this year she secured a grant from the SRP Foundation that will allow that work to get started.
Each image will take anywhere from two to 10 hours to clean and digitize. The 3,000 feet of Goldwater’s 1940 Colorado River epic alone will cost $100,000.
Ultimately, she hopes to build a digital library of Goldwater’s work that will not only serve as an educational resource, but will also generate revenue the way Getty Images and Bettmann Archive do. But the biggest enemy of film is time. Photographic film is made of cellulose acetate, a type of plastic that is susceptible to irreversible decay known as cellulose triacetate degradation, or “vinegar syndrome.” Vinegar syndrome is caused by a chemical reaction that releases acetic acid, the same ingredient that gives vinegar its pungent smell when the film is exposed to heat, light and humidity.
While Goldwater’s archives have been stored in as close to optimal conditions as possible, some degradation is inevitable.
And the process of digitizing a single image, let alone 15,000 images, is complex and daunting and must follow rigorous federal standards to ensure the item being archived is as close to a perfect copy of the original as possible.
JP Westenskow, a digital-imaging technician for the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said that if the negative or print has deteriorated, no steps are taken to correct for color fade or to interpret the artist’s intent. Rather, the images are copied exactly as they appear when they come to the technician.
Westenskow said the process essentially involves using a highly sophisticated camera to make a picture of the image being digitized.
“We don’t do scanning,” he said. “We actually photograph the image.”
That occurs after extensive preparations, including temperature and humidity controls, before the picture is taken using a special lens to eliminate distortion. Just ensuring the lens is in focus can take several minutes, Westenskow said.
Processing the image after it is snapped is laborious and time-consuming as well, but the rigorous standards are essential “to create the highest quality,” he said.
“We talk about museum quality,” he said, “well, this is a museum. It’s important that in 100 years will people be able to see it exactly as it appeared to us?”
The other sides of Goldwater
While Goldwater was a photographer much longer than he was a politician, his two worlds sometimes intersected.
In 1964, Goldwater published a limited-edition coffee-table book as a fundraiser for his presidential campaign. Two years ago, Ronald Reagan’s personal copy sold at auction at Christie’s for $15,000.
In today’s hyperpartisan political climate, it’s hard to remember that Democrats and Republicans didn’t always demonize each other. Goldwater was a part of that bygone era. In a 1980 memoir, he recounted how he had looked forward to facing former Senate friend and colleague John F. Kennedy and was devastated by his assassination.
Not long after Kennedy became president, he invited a group of senators and representatives to the White House. Goldwater brought along his trusty camera — something that would probably not be allowed today — and shot candids of those in attendance, including the president himself.
He later gave Kennedy a copy of a photo he’d taken of him, which Kennedy sent back with the inscription “To Barry Goldwater, whom I urge to follow the career for which he has shown such talent — photography!”