Until the advent of Tuck Johnson the heroic natural beauties of Peru and indeed the whole Andean scene were spectacles hidden from the eyes of men. Tuck's camera fixed them in our memories. His was a significant work, and though it was ended by an airplane accident in November this significance will be perpetuate.
One of the best known aerial photographers in the world and a pioneer in this impressive combination of art and science, an able and daring pilot and a human being with a gift of the first order for friendship with his fellows wherever he found them, Tuck will be regretted by thousands who delighted and profited in his work and found pleasure in his companionship.
A student of aerial photography from his boyhood, he enlisted at 18 in the Fourteenth Photographic Section of the United States Army and served his apprenticeship in the profession which he was to lead in skies ripped by shell fire and scarred by the trajectory of enemy planes. On his return to the United States he was employed by a company which sent him to Peru, a country which became his especial province as an aerial photographer and which yielded to him the material for not a few of the photographic masterpieces of our time.
The place fascinated him and he severed his business connection to become Chief Aerial Photographer of the Peruvian Navy. As such he laid the foundations of his great reputation, the structure of which he completed when, in 1930, he became co-leader of the Shippee-Johnson Expedition. As material for scientific record and as artistic achievement the results of that Expedition are too well known to require enumeration here.
It suffices to say that for the first time the high Andes, the mighty Cordillera Real in Peru, sat for portraits which have no equals of their sort in the world. Unmapped volcanoes, valleys the existence of which were forgotten even in the days of vice-royal Lima, ruins of Pre-Columbian civilizations and rivers to which, no white man had ever penetrated, became subjects for Tuck's camera and Bob Shippee's pen and matters of daily routine to men so young, perhaps, and so inspired by their undertaking, that no hazard was too great for them and no hardship too onerous.