John Morris with Clara Parks in the Arizona Desert

John Morris with Clara Parks in the Arizona Desert

John Morris lies on the ground in the Arizona desert. Clara Parks stands nearby.

Clara and Bill Parks live in a homemade cabin in Cave Creek, Arizona and spent time traveling and camping outdoors. The couple was featured in Ladies' Home Journal in 1947 as part of a series called "How America Lives;" Clara herself wrote the article to accompany Kosti Ruohomaa’s photographs.  The images depict Clara cooking over an open fire, riding a horse, and sleeping under the stars, as well as pictures of Clara and Bill in cowboy hats appreciating cactuses and the desert landscape.

In her article, Clara tells of meeting her husband when she decided to learn to ride at a stable where Bill worked. Her love for the outdoors is clear, and she maintains a relentlessly positive tone while describing the ups and downs of their adventurous travels, from working on a farm picking beans, to sleeping in a ghost town, to mining for gold.  “If we’re in the money, we’ll eat steak. If we’re broke, we’ll eat beans. All we need is our ‘28 Chevy and a chance to follow the sun together.”

Kosti also took photographs of John Morris, the photo editor of Ladies Home Journal who chose Kosti for this assignment. Several of Kosti Ruohomaa’s photographs were published in the August, 1947 issue of Ladies' Home Journal pp. 141-146, along with some snapshots by Clara Parks.

John G. Morris (1917-2017) was an influential picture editor for several prominent publications. “Forceful and sometimes fractious, Mr. Morris had a peripatetic career that included stops at most of the major postwar centers of American photojournalism. In addition to Life, he worked for The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic and the celebrated cooperative agency Magnum Photos.”

“…a lifelong Quaker and pacifist…” Morris was bent on showing people the terrifying truth of war through photos, pressing to get images published that went against the policies of the publication he worked for. “Mr. Morris was closely associated with images of war, which he was instrumental in placing before the eyes of the world.”

“Great photographers have to have three things,” Morris once explained. “They have to have heart if they’re going to photograph people. They have to have an eye, obviously, to be able to compose. And they have to have a brain to think about what they’re shooting. Too many photographers have two of the three attributes, but not the third." Grundberg, Andy. "John G. Morris, Renowned Photo Editor in the Thick of History, Dies at 100." New York Times, July 28, 2017.

While Morris was an editor at Ladies Home Journal, he chose Kosti Ruohomaa for an assignment for their series How America Lives. “I met Kosti through his photographs. They told me a lot about the America my folks had come from… Kosti’s pictures spoke of the countryside—of barns and gravel roads and Model T Fords, of campfires and town meetings and post offices where you went to get your mail… It was for those reasons that I chose Kosti to photograph two families for the Ladies’ Home Journal series called 'How America Lives.' The first was a family in Maine, not far from where Kosti grew up. … The second family could not have been more different—a young couple homesteading in the Arizona desert. For that one I flew to Phoenix with Kosti and rented a car. After a day or so I left Kosti to finish the shoot on his own. I didn’t need to worry. " P.14
Bonner-Ganter, Deanna. 2016. The Photographer Poet. Down East Books.