CLOSE-UPS

"These photographs, looked at as a group, become a primer on the effect of different kinds of lighting in photography," Dusard says. And this final image is a testament to his colleague Bruce Barnbaum's assertion that "light determines form." This is a classic example of cross-lighting.

CLOSE-UPS PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN P. SCHAEFER

John P. Schaefer moves quietly through the exhibition gallery at the University of Ari-zona's Center for Creative Photography, scanning work by co-founder Ansel Adams. Pausing before an image of Mission San Xavier del Bac, Schaefer recalls the photo essay Adams did there with writer Nancy Newhall, and how he encouraged Schaefer to photograph his own.

"I had never done anything like that, so I said, 'T'll try it,' which is how I got to be a pretty good black-and-white photographer," Schaefer says. "The statues were patient subjects. If I screwed up a picture, I'd come back and try to get it right."

But he vowed not to repeat Adams' images.

"I took one on the other side of the dome and arches," he says. "Ansel looked at it and said, 'I wish I had taken that picture.' That made me feel really good."

Schaefer had been drawn to photography since childhood. "My parents were immigrants," he says. "We communicated through photographs, sending pictures back and forth. That was the way I got to know my relatives."

He got serious about photography in graduate school.

"I've always had an interest in art, even though my background's in science," he says. "I could never draw or paint worth a damn, so photography became a way of creating images that had an artistic flavor."

Inspiration for the center arose during Schaefer's tenure as president of the University of Arizona.

"I was actually a collector of books for the university," he recalls. "But it took me only about a year to realize that Harvard and Yale had a 300-year head start. It occurred to me that photography was a very important American art form. It was the way we recorded our history. It was responsible for social reform. And no university was collecting this material in a serious way."

Then Adams came to the university for a one-man show. "Ten minutes into the show, I asked him if he'd like to give us his archives," Schaefer recalls. Adams was taken aback, but eventually agreed. So did four others in his circle, including Arizona photographer Frederick Sommer. Today, the center is home to the largest collection of 20th century American photographs, artifacts and archives in the world.

Schaefer always considered himself a black-and-white photographer, though he had done some color photography for books on the Papago (Tohono O'odham) and Tarahumara Indians. Then he started shooting cactuses. "I started photographing them in black and white," he recalls. "Then the silly things started blooming."

To date, he has photographed around 500 species. On his website, he writes that they reflect "a photographer's interaction," not "a botanist's use," though he's arranged them alphabetically, by scientific name.

He admits it's partly the intersection of science and art in photography that he finds appealing. "It's a physical, chemical process," he says. "I [could] understand what was going on, brew things up on my own, do experiments of what happens when you vary one thing and another."

As Schaefer turns to leave, a black-and-white portrait of Ansel Adams catches his eye.

"By golly," he says, surprised. "There's a picture of mine."

“Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers — and never succeeding.”