David Muench in Texas
DAVID MUENCH belongs to the world pantheon of master photographers. After studying photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he began his career in the 1950s shooting for Arizona Highways in the near-far style of color landscape photography pioneered by his father, Josef Muench. Over the succeeding half-century, David Muench has spent more than twelve thousand days in the field. His resulting body of work, filling forty solo books, has defined the iconography of Western wilderness color photography as authoritatively as Ansel Adams did in black-and-white. This parity was recognized in the exhibition Arizona Highways: The Photography of Ansel Adams, David Muench and Jack Dykinga, which appeared at the Center for Creative Photography and the Phoenix Art Museum in 2000. In 2004, Muench received the Photographic Society of America's highest award, the Progress Award. Muench has worked in many parts of the world renowned for natural beauty, from New Zealand to Iceland, but the Big Bend area of Texas -- especially Big Bend National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Hueco Tanks State Historic Site, and Monahans Sandhills State Park -- remains his favorite photographic locality in the world.