(upbeat music) - For over the past 60 years, Arizona PBS has told incredible stories of Arizona's distinctive people, beautiful landscapes, and treasured history.

Now relive those memories we've pulled "From the Vault."

Hello, I'm Alberto Rios.

He was an Arizona Native known worldwide as a politician and statesman.

Go behind the lens, and see him in a new light.

Here's "Barry Goldwater: Photographs and Memories."

(enchanting music) - [Hugh] They were the elders, the healers, the keepers of tradition, the children looking toward a changing future, images of Native peoples, taken more than half a century ago by a most unlikely photographer.

He was born to wealth, a child of privilege who hungered for adventure, a restless young man whose success with a camera would help launch his political career.

Barry Goldwater, he photographed the famous places of Arizona, the unfamous places, and everything in between, thousands of images that reveal as much about the man as his home state.

(camera shutter clicking) - [Goldwater] You can't spend a day in this state and not fall in love with it.

I don't care where you are.

It's like you see a woman you like, you fall in love with her.

What happens then is up to you.

(bright music) - [Hugh] This is the story of the man behind the camera, and the passion for photography and Arizona that changed his life forever.

(dramatic music) There are those who see the Western landscape as harsh and barren, and those who see it as spacious and inviting.

It depends on a person's point of view.

Goldwater's outlook was shaped by his identity as a Westerner.

- If anything, Barry Goldwater was the 20th century incarnation of the Westerner.

The true Westerner was a family man, a man who carved an existence out of a hostile world, loved that world, loved the beauty of it, while still committed to changing it, to making it the future.

- [Hugh] Goldwater's grandfather, Big Mike Goldwater, arrived on the Western frontier in the 1850s.

- He was a pioneer in many, many respects.

He made lots of money, but he also wrote a social contract that would determine how his family, his descendants would behave for all time.

He believed that you gave back in equal measure to what you received.

- [Hugh] Goldwater's mother Josephine also embraced the spirit of the West.

She put Arizona to use as an open air classroom for her children, and kept cameras around to take snapshots of family outings.

- They had to learn to shoot guns, to fish, to deal with the Indians as people, not as objects of curiosity, which was very common in Arizona at the time.

They didn't visit the reservations to study the tribes in any sort of sense.

They went to the reservation to visit friends.

(dramatic music) - [Hugh] By the time he reached adulthood, Barry Goldwater had developed a fascination with Northern Arizona, home to Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon, and the remote lands of the Indian reservations.

A favorite destination was Rainbow Natural Bridge.

- [Goldwater] It's the world's largest natural bridge, tall enough to put the capital building in Washington under.

It is a beautiful place.

I've slept on top of it.

In those days, you could camp out any place.

We'd just put the rope bedroll on the ground and go to sleep, and if you were sleeping near sheep, you'd hear the bells in the morning.

It sounds beautiful, that sound in the morning.

(enchanting music) - [Goldwater] In marriage, Goldwater found a kindred spirit.

It was Peggy who bought him his first professional camera in 1935.

She also bought him a more unusual gift, Rainbow Lodge and Trading Post.

Located near Rainbow Bridge, the lodge was so isolated that the only easy access was by Goldwater's private plane.

The lodge soon became a meeting place for his Navajo neighbors.

- Where I lived, there were only my wife, myself, and my partner and his wife.

There were four non-Indians that they knew, and they'd come into our main house at the lodge, and they knew where the coffee was.

They'd pour coffee and sit down, and just they had great senses of humor.

They'd laugh like hell, and then they might say, "Well, you come and see us."

(lively music) - [Hugh] When visitors found their way up to the lodge, Goldwater led them on rugged mule rides.

- [Goldwater] The trail went from here, 14 miles down to Rainbow Natural Bridge.

(horse whinnying) (lively music) The best year I ever had, I took about 400 people down to see it, and now thanks to Lake Powell, there'll be 5,000 people, and we can't see it.

- I think Goldwater's one of the first of the Arizona residents who's not an Indian, who comes to Northern Arizona, and is able to see that country on its own terms.

He appreciates what's there rather than what's not there, and he's quite taken by the kind of sky, the kind of remarkable land formations, and because of the kind of person he is, he wants to see, and feel, and smell, and taste this country.

- [Hugh] At his home in Phoenix, Goldwater assembled a sizeable collection of books and photos on the Southwest, which he gladly showed to students.

- One of them wanted to know if I'd ever been to Pipe Springs.

I said, "Yes, I've been there."

"You have a picture?"

I said, "No," so that started me off.

I took my camera, and started traveling around the state, and taking pictures.

I wanted people to know what Arizona looked like.

(enchanting music) (thunder crashing) - [Hugh] Now Goldwater had a mission, to photograph and record Arizona, all of it, all the people and places he knew so well, but to capture and convey the unique character of the Southwest, he had to find the right photographic style.

He found it in the work of photographic legends like Edward Weston.

A master of light and shadow, Weston influenced an entire generation of photographers who pursued a direct and candid style.

Goldwater later met Weston's protege, Ansel Adams in a chance encounter on the Navajo Reservation.

- [Goldwater] I first met Ansel on the trail to the Rainbow Natural Bridge, and we had a good relationship.

He was in my mind, one of the three or four great photographers we've ever had.

He and Edward Weston were, I think, the two best we ever had photographing Native people.

(bright music) That's one of the best Indian pictures I ever took.

I had seen this little natural bridge on the north side of Navajo Mountain, so I took my two boys and a couple of Navajo kids, and we drove the truck as far as we could, and then we found this old man sitting in a hogan, and we asked him where the bridge was, and he pointed, and we walked another five miles, and there was a bridge, but I did take this picture, and I'll never get another one just like it.

It's a good picture, even if I do say so.

I call this picture "The Old."

It's an old Navajo woman in front of an old tree that has fallen down.

I just stumbled on her one day I was walking around, and I saw her, and she let me take her picture.

You can tell she wasn't too happy.

That's my famous one, "Charlie Potato."

It was just a fantastic picture.

I was sitting next to him up on a hill at Navajo fair, and I looked at his face, and thought that's a good face.

So I said, "Would you let me take your picture?"

I took two pictures.

That's one of them.

- Barry photographed, not as an outsider, but as somebody who was part of the state of Arizona, who was part of the West, who knew the role and the importance of Native Americans, and who knew their real social setting, their real social problems, and didn't try to hide any of that.

He photographed Native Americans with both great dignity, but also with great realism.

(enchanting music) - [Hugh] Photographing the reservations year after year, Goldwater became a chronicler of changing times.

- [Goldwater] Last year when I took some people up through the Monument Valley and the Navajo country, I saw as many houses as I saw hogans.

And you go into the hogans, most of 'em have cement floors, electricity, ice boxes, and that's what, I miss it, but I don't miss it because it might deprive them, but the old way, if they ask you in for a (speaking foreign language), which means dinner, and you'd go in there, and there'd be a big old pot right in the middle of the hogan, with a whole sheep in there.

Now, they'd trim it, they'd take all the hair off, the wool, and the women would be sitting on one side, the men on the other.

The men would be singing songs.

- This really is a world that will never appear again.

The photographs and the writings of the '30s and the early '40s are really central documents in preserving a kind of time that, for better or for worse, would no longer be there.

(enchanting music) - [Hugh] As Goldwater crisscrossed Arizona by airplane, horseback, and on foot, he seemed to judge everything as worthy of recording.

He published his vision of Arizona in books and periodicals, and readily took assignments for the state government's travel magazine.

- The editor of "Arizona Highways" asked me to get a picture of Navajo girls tending their sheep in the snow.

Well, I said, "Ray, that's a great picture, but it doesn't snow up here at that time of the year."

Well, I was up there about two or three weeks later, and I woke up one morning and by God, it had snowed.

And I had seen these girls with their sheep about three miles down the road, so I hurriedly got dressed.

I had my camera, walked three miles down there, and sure enough, there they were, so I took this picture, and I also took it in color, and this was the first color cover ever used by the "Arizona Highway" magazine.

(enchanting music) - [Hugh] People outside Arizona also took notice of his work.

Over the years, his pictures would be exhibited in more than 300 galleries from Milan to Tokyo.

(bright music) Goldwater was a tireless promoter of Arizona.

In 1940, he even painted a welcome sign on the wall of Glen Canyon.

It wasn't just a matter of pride in his home state.

Goldwater also shared the business community's desire for economic development, where he viewed Arizona as an evolving landscape, rich with opportunity.

- As Goldwater comes of age, he looks to Arizona, and he recognizes its promise, and he realizes that there is a society that is taking shape here that someone who has vision, and energy, and imagination can play a really important role in.

- He moves from one community to the next, one canvas of human energy, unfolding to the next, a city, to a hamlet, to a Native American village.

It's a campaign trail unfolding in which he has met Arizona.

He has looked at it, he has spoken to it, he has shaken its hand, and he is now ready to become its voice.

(bright music) - [Hugh] Anyone looking for adventure in Arizona need look no further than the Grand Canyon, and it was a Grand Canyon adventure that changed the course of Goldwater's life.

- I walked every trail in this canyon.

You'd never get over it.

There's so much of it.

It's 200 and, about 280 miles long, about 250 miles of rapids.

The rapids are exciting, and they're fun, but to me, it's not the river so much is it's looking at the rocks, and just thinking.

You look down there at those black rocks at the bottom, the inner gorge, those were once mountains higher than the present Alps.

Can you imagine that?

- [Hugh] No one who explored the canyon, as Goldwater did, could help but feel the shadow of history fall across his path, the shadow of the canyon's greatest adventurer, John Wesley Powell, the man Goldwater calls a one-armed genius.

In 1869, Powell led the first expedition down the Colorado River, and left his own choice of names on the natural features that Goldwater would later photograph, Music Temple, Marble Canyon, Bright Angel Creek.

In 1940, a river trip was organized to recreate the Powell voyage.

Goldwater decided to record the trip with a boatload of still and movie cameras.

(compelling music) - [Announcer] At first, we were disappointed.

This was too tame.

Of course the water was swift, but where were those much advertised rapids?

Then we began to hear them.

It was a strange, menacing roar echoing between the steep walls of the gorge.

The river carried as relentlessly onward, until rounding the last bend, we saw the first rapids ahead, tumbled, angry, lashing water, broken and thrown by the boulders studding the river bed.

It was as if some hand snatched our boat and held it bounding and twisting down this mighty drop through which the water forged.

- [Hugh] Arizona audiences loved it.

For the first time, they had a taste of Arizona's greatest adventure.

Goldwater made personal appearances at movie theaters for two years, and the acclaim pointed to a future he hadn't anticipated.

- I was the 70th person to ever go through the canyon.

Well, that's what got, I really think, got me started into politics.

I took moving pictures of the trip, and I guess I averaged four times a week showing that picture all over the state, and when somebody suggested I run for the Senate, I thought, "Well, if there's anybody in the state I haven't shown these pictures to, I don't know who they are."

So I got into politics for that reason.

- [Election Announcer] 16 votes for Senator Barry Goldwater.

(crowd cheering) - [Hugh] In time, Barry Goldwater rose to power in the US Senate, ran for president, earned a reputation for statesmanship, and became famous for his plain speaking.

- They finally got to the banks of the Colorado River, and there established the Goldwater name in Arizona, and how in the devil they did it without federal aid, I'll never know.

(audience laughing) - [Hugh] He retained his passion for new people and places, and captured just about all of them on film.

(enchanting music) - [Goldwater] This picture I took in Spain.

It was one of those lucky pictures.

I was driving a car from Madrid, and this man was standing there, sweeping the street, and the dust from his sweeping had accumulated, and the sun was shining through, and I think it's one of the most beautiful pictures I ever took - [Hugh] True to his family code of giving back in equal measure for what one has received, Goldwater recently donated his photographic legacy to the public.

It's housed in three Arizona institutions, 15,000 photographs in all, thousands of feet of film footage.

The collection is perhaps most valued for its Native American photographs.

- [Goldwater] I photographed every tribe, and they're damn good people.

They're very, very good people.

I liked them.

(enchanting music) - [Hugh] Today, Barry Goldwater is still taking pictures, still returning to the Grand Canyon.

- If I ever have a mistress, it's gonna be the canyon.

Taking moving pictures, still pictures, never get tired looking at this thing.

- [Hugh] With 15,000 photographs to his name, Goldwater leaves a record for the future, chronicling the changing times of Arizona, capturing moments that are gone forever, and one can't help but wonder what his portrait will be when history turns the lens on him.

- I just wanna be remembered as an honest guy that tried.

You can't be remembered in a kinder way than have people say, "Well, he wasn't much of a politician, but by God, he was honest."

(bright music)