Onward Project

We are so excited to share our latest graphic biography website, featuring the inspiring story of Gertie Austin.

Gertie was the wife of Max Littlesalt, the guide and interpreter for the historic Rainbow Bridge–Monument Valley Expedition. Her story—often overlooked—reveals the essential role that women played not only in the success of the Expedition but also in everyday life across the Southwest during the 1930s and beyond.

The idea for this project was first sparked years ago by our dear friend and collaborator Louise Denetso. With her encouragement—and the enthusiasm of her family—we’ve been able to bring Gertie’s story to life. Louise’s daughter, Lithuania Denetso, a close friend and researcher, contributed a moving foreword describing the words she wishes she could have said to her grandmother, Gertie. Click the link below to read it and experience our latest website!

https://gertie.onwardproject.org/

We are thrilled to share with you our latest website, focused on aerial photography!
Visit here: https://aerials.onwardproject.org/

In the 1930s, aerial photography was used for the first time to study the landscapes of Northern Arizona. In 2019, The ONWARD Project returned to photograph the same region from the air. Our new website lets you compare historic and contemporary aerial images — we hope you enjoy the different perspectives.

We remain aware that the land that we and the Expedition members flew over is Navajo, Paiute, Hopi and Zuni and as such hold many personal and community histories that belong to these places. The aerial viewpoint gives us the ability to travel over this wider region to focus solely on topography and geographical relationships as did the Expedition fliers and photographers in the 1930’s. In the tradition of many Native Peoples, maps they create of specific landscapes often represent a bird’s eye viewpoint.

More updates from our latest newsletter:

Aerial Website
We have been working with website designer Ben Benjamin on a special website comparing the many breathtaking aerial photographs from the 1930's with images from the present. The RBMVExpedition aerial survey was one of the first in association with a large-scale study and was part of the impressive in depth surveys of the Northern Arizona region undertaken by the Expedition. Inspired by these early aerial surveys, in 2018 we hired two small planes and flew with four photographers from The ONWARD Project to recreate some of these images. The website will launch in the new year. Stay tuned!

In today's newsletter we are excited to share with you some behind the scenes moments during the designing and creation of our forthcoming graphic biography about Gertie Austin, Max Littlesalt’s wife. So much work and energy goes into the making of the biographies from the many family members, writers, editors, artists, beta testers, website developers and more. We thought we would share some pieces of this process with you while we finalize the website. The process of creation began with Madi Fair who, in addition to heading up all of our Production and Social Media, is also a photographer and illustrator. We asked her to write, design, and create this latest online graphic biography website.

Above is Madi Fair's breakfast nook which doubled as an art table for the past 6 months. She borrowed her mother's light box, upgraded her watercolor set and made sure she had fresh drawing pens ready to go.

Madi created many of the drawings in the graphic biography by tracing over an image using the light box and making the simple image more visually appealing by adding crosshatching and detailed linework.