Background

Jack Dykinga was born on January 2, 1943, in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Education

Jack Dykinga was raised in a conservative Republican family. He developed an interest in photography while studying at Riverside Brookfield High School. In 1958, he won the photo contest of Look Magazine with a football image. The first success encouraged him and influenced the ongoing choice of profession.

Dykinga studied at Saint Procopius College in Lisle, Illinois (currently Benedictine University) in the middle of the 1960s. He also attended Elmhurst College.

Career

The start of Jack Dykinga’s career can be counted from 1962 when he joined the staff of Metro News Photos Company. A year after, while still a college student, he was employed by the Chicago Tribune where he worked as a photojournalist before being assigned an editorial photographer in the Chicago Sun-Times.

In the late 1960s, Dykinga covered the social turbulence of the United States. He took photos of the omnipresent Civil Rights marches, demonstrations, and the riots after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. In 1970, the photographer was chosen to document the situation arisen in state mental hospitals. He was sent to the Lincoln and Dixon State Schools for the Retarded in Illinois where he completed the work in three days. Dykinga’s dramatic photo story encouraged the authorities to increase funding for this kind of institutions.

A photo trip to climb the Mount Rainier pushed Jack Dykinga to shift from photojournalism and become a nature and conservation photographer. In 1976, soon after the journey, he moved to Arizona where he worked as photo editor of the Arizona Daily Star for nine years. Since then, Dykinga has traveled to a great number of world nature locales documenting their beauty and contributing to the conservation of nature. He has joined the forces with the talent of many notable photographers to draw special attention to the environmental issues.

Dykinga has been and continues to be a frequent contributor to Arizona Highways and National Geographic Magazine. In 2007, he took photos of the Texas/Mexico border for the latter showing the biodiversity of protected areas along the Rio Grande River corridor. The same time, along with his photo colleagues, Jack Dykinga took part at the Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition organized for the International League of Conservation Photographers to visualize the threat to the El Triunfo cloud forest in Chiapas, Mexico.

Jack Dykinga also raises attention to environmental concerns through teaching photography and organizing international workshops. In that capacity, he has taught at the University of Arizona and Pima Community College. Besides, Dykinga has issued many large-format books of his own authorship, including Large Format Nature Photography manual and the latest 2017 volume ‘A Photographer's Life’, and contributed to the projects of others, like Mexico’s Agrupacion Sierra Madre’s book on the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, ‘The Great Tamaulipan Natural Province’.

Jack Dykinga has exhibited his photos all around the world, including such art spaces as the Phoenix Art Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the San Diego Natural History Museum, and shows organized by the National Press Photographers Association.

Nowadays, Dykinga is involved as a board member in the activity related to the Sonoran National Park Project whose main goal is to create a new binational park on the border of Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.

Achievements

• Jack Dykinga is one of the notable representatives of landscape photography who managed to combine his experience of a photojournalist with master use of light and composition to create dramatic and capturing images that don’t lose their relevance no matter how long ago they have been produced.
  
  During the fifty years of photo career, Dykinga’s contributions to photography and his activity in the field of the environmental protection have been marked by such distinctions like the awards from the Chicago Press Photographers Association, trophy of the Inland Daily Press Association, and the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for the shots made in Lincoln and Dixon State Schools for the Retarded in Illinois.
  
  In 2011, Dykinga received the Outstanding Photographer of the Year award from the North American Nature Photography Association.

Works

More photos

• photography

  • Nankoweap

  • Desertview Thunderhead

  • Little Colorado

  • Utah Agave, Shivwis Plateau

  • Striation Reflection

  • Fallen Agave

  • Laura's Gift, Fern Glen Canyon

  • Shoshone Sunrise

  • Redwall Cavern Panorama One, from the back looking out, Grand Canyon, Arizona

  • Temple Light

  • Mount Hayden Dream

  • Paria Patterns

  • Sizzling Watchtower

  • Manzanita

  • North Canyon Confluence

  • Fire in the Sky, Cape Royal

  • Sun Dagger, National Canyon

  • Moran Rim

  • Bent, but Unbroken

  • Deep in National

  • Calf Creek Reflections

  • Stone Canyon

  • Chihauhua Mountain Reflection

  • Bee plant, Phacelia, Factory Butte

  • Prairie Sunflower

  • Survival Tree

  • Blizzard Pine

Views

Jack Dykinga believes that the photographer should carefully investigate the area to take really good photos of it.

Quotations: "I try to let my image speak for the land, that is in many cases threatened by development."

Membership

Jack Dykinga is a board member of the Sonoran Desert National Park Project.

Interests

• Dykinga was influenced by the photojournalists of the Chicago Sun Times.

Connections

Jack Dykinga married Margaret Malley in 1965. They have a son named Peter who manages the collection of his father’s photos.

Spouse:

Margaret Malley

Son:

Peter Dykinga

References

• Jack Dykinga's Official Website