Saguaros
September 3 – 26, 1992
The saguaro cactus grows only in the Sonoran Desert in the state of Arizona and the cross border state of Sonora, Mexico. Individual cactus may grow as tall as forty feet and live for over 200 years. After about seventy years the cactus may grow arms. They are magnificent plants, and walking among, them they have a presence that is undeniably human. For centuries people native to the desert have considered saguaros to be the souls of lost ancestors.
I included the cacti in photographs as soon as I moved to Arizona in 1982. Then sometime around 1987 I started to make a series of what I considered to be saguaro portraits. I would find a cactus that interested me and walk around it, examining all sides. I made photographs of entire plants, from a similar distance, showing top, bottom and arms. The series was originally given the name “Desert Citizens.”
I would put the photographs I made in a drawer, and after about twenty years I had several hundred saguaro negatives. I thought of the work as a kind of typology, and felt that the photographs needed to be seen as a group, rather than individually. I had occasion to show them in groups of five or more, and some early saguaro portraits appeared in the book Revealing Territory. In 2007 the book Saguaros was published and included about seventy black and white saguaro photographs.
I also occasionally made color photographs of saguaros. And when the series was restarted around 2012, I started to made them again in color using a medium format digital back. Some of these were included in the project on El Camino del Diablo. I consider the saguaro portraits an ongoing series.