Esther Henderson

Her first year of business found Ray Carlson, the new editor at Arizona Highways at her studio looking to buy photographs. This started a long collaboration that culminated in the January 1968 issue of the magazine being dedicated to her photographs.

She and her husband Chuck Abbott moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1963 where they lived until their deaths. While in Santa Cruz they were actively involved in the community and were remembered for their work restoring a number of houses in town. They also initiated an effort to clean up and restore downtown Santa Cruz, for which they are memorialized in the name Abbott Square.

Way Out West with Esther Henderson was a photographic feature in the Saturday edition of the Tucson (Daily) Citizen newspaper from 1952 to 1958. A photo she took of Mather Point in the Grand Canyon was featured in a January 1958 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

She spent seven years in as a dancer during the Great Depression in New York City, before changing careers to study photography as it would offer "freedom and creativity." She attended the New York Institute of Photography and then moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1935 to start her photography career. She married Charles “Chuck” Abbott in 1940, a fellow photographer 15 years her senior. The two worked together and, with their two sons, traveled and wrote and photographed for travel publications.

Esther Henderson (also known as Esther Abbott) (July 24, 1911 – August 22, 2008) was an American landscape photographer. She was a major contributor to Arizona Highways beginning in the 1930s.

Esther Henderson was born in 1911 in Oak Park, Illinois. She was an only child. As a child she had a key experience during a series of visits to rural Arizona in 1929. During a visit to the Grand Canyon with her parents, she peered over the edge of the canyon and upon leaving she wanted to return as soon as possible.