LANDSCAPES

TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT

Every month, we showcase the most talented photographers in the world. Now it's your turn to join the ranks. Enter your favorite photo in our Arizona Highways Online Photography Contest.

You could win an Arizona Highways Photo Workshop valued at $2,500 or a prize package from Tempe Camera.

Our contest is open to amateur and professional photographers. All photos must be made in Arizona and fit into the following categories: Landscape, Wildlife and Macro (close-up). Only one image per person, per category, may be entered.

For details, scan this QR code with your smart phone, or visit www.arizonahighways.com. First-, secondand third-place winners will be published in our September 2012 issue and online beginning January 15.

LANDSCAPES PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAY DUSARD

For many, the name Jay Dusard is synonymous with cowboys. And not just because Dusard has earned a few paychecks working cattle. As a photographer, he is best known for The North American Cowboy, the fruit of a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to visit ranches from Canada to Mexico taking portraits of ranch hands with an 8x10 camera. But it was the landscapes he encountered - 20 years earlier - that made Dusard want to be a photographer. As a student of architecture at the University of Florida, Dusard embarked on a travel scholarship that changed the course of his life. "The dean of the college said there's nothing worth seeing that's not on the Eastern seaboard," Dusard recalls. "So naturally I decided

to go to California and make a big circle. And while I was out there to study architecture, what I really was responding to was the landscape of the West. It was sculpture to occupy as a human being, and I knew that as soon as I got certain obligations out of the way I was going to live in the West." After college and a stint in the Army, Dusard moved to Tucson, where he worked as a draftsman and designer but never got his license. "I just couldn't face up to living in a city and running a business," he says. "I knew that I would never be able to pull that off." Dusard encountered photography almost by accident during college. While most of his classmates took a photography elective with Jerry Uelsmann, Dusard took up painting. But when a friend showed him a book of black-and-white photos by Aaron Siskind, he was hooked. “I made a promise to myself. Someday I would take up photography and get good at it,” he says.

“It looks like a Manhattan cityscape upside down,” says Dusard of this panoramic image, made with his large-format view camera behind Standing Cow Ruin in Canyon del Muerto. Dusard loves the abstract aspects of the photograph - he says that abstract qualities are often the inspiration for his art.

As Dusard began to drift away from architecture, that's what he did. He studied books by Ansel Adams and attended Adams' workshop at Yosemite, working primarily in 8x10 because it made him work slowly, contemplatively and accurately.

The idea to combine two landscapes, as he did in this month's cover photo, was inspired by photographer Bruce Barnbaum.

“He started making composite landscapes from two negatives, and that really offended some people,” Dusard says. “I was fascinated by it.”Weaver Mountains From Canyon de Chelly is one of only two composites Dusard attempted (the other is on page 9). He thought the images would work well together because the Weaver Mountains rise out of a flat plain, and Canyon de Chelly is incised into a flat plateau. To combine them, he put a negative in each of two enlargers, exposing one half of the paper at a time with the appropriate image. “The interface provided a narrow 'blend zone' that with a little print bleaching with a watercolor brush accomplished the result,” he says.

Phoenix Art Museum Director James Ballinger bought the original. Dusard doesn't do much darkroom work these days. From a modest brick home surrounded by horse corrals north of Douglas, Dusard is currently at work on an e-book titled Vaqueros and Buckaroos.

“I took a riskier path in life and have been proud of what I accomplished,” he says. “My wife thought I should have tried to become a cowboy artist and we'd be rich now. But photography was what I could excel at.”

"What you have caught on film is captured forever ... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything."

"Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing; light is everything."