Jay Dusard Documents the Cowboy

JAY DUSARD Documenting the Cowboy

We are about to meet an extraordinary man by the name of Jay Dusard. By mutual agreement, we are waiting for him at an equally extraordinary locale: the Palace bar, on Whiskey Row, in the heart of Prescott, Arizona. Jay Dusard is a photographer in the tradition of the great American image makers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, who has recently received a Guggenheim fellowship for the purpose of concluding a project of his. Dusard intends to photograph cowboys from Canada to Mexico. The object is to produce portraits in black and white with an unwieldy, but superbly accurate view camera, using 8x10-inch film. In this day of miniature equipment, such an undertaking is a startling departure, reminiscent of Matthew Brady and other pioneers in American photography. The proud and hardy men who worked the cattle in this Sierra Prieta and Bradshaw Mountain country have always gravitated towards the Palace bar on Whiskey Row, a beacon of sophistication in a sea of sweat and hard labor. This venerable institution has long been a harbor for the working cowboy after hours, sometimes even acting as an employment office for wranglers fallen on hard times. The cowpunchers never had anything but good things to say about it. Not much has changed in the Palace bar since the old days. The clientele is still mostly cattle people, sipping their drinks along the slim oaken counter running down the length of the place. Nowadays, a few twinkling neon beer ads are reflected in the dulled mirrors behind the bottles framed by filigree wooden cutouts. But the paneled ceiling is said to still contain the slugs of yesterday's shoot-outs. During the momentary lull before the evening crowd, the bartender breaks a frame of pool with a customer, while another lone cowboy looks on morosely from his stool. And then, between the clicks of the balls on the green baize, the doors fling open, and a man enters vigorously.

("bandido-cut") accents a strong, fleshy nose, and his small, sparkling eyes peer around like those of a recently surfaced otter until they fasten on us.

It is indeed Jay Dusard who is now sharing a beer with us. How did this strong man from St. Louis wind up in Prescott, Arizona? What prompted this former student of architecture at the University of Florida to chuck it all and photograph cowboys up and down the West? Why did he choose the most cumbersome of apparatus, the 8x10 view camera, as his mode of expression?

Jay smiles at all these questions and suggests we talk about it over a steak somewhere.

Dusard, who still feels uncomfortable in a city, remembers moving with his family from St. Louis to the farmlands of the Midwest, where he took to the outdoors like a fish to water. It broke his heart when the family ultimately moved on to Florida, but the livelihood of his father was at stake. Jay, enrolled at the University of Florida in Gainesville, decided on architecture as his field. It was there he became interested in painting and as a senior earnestly studied abstract expressionism. It was there, also, he had his first meaningful contact with photography.

"All my friends were taking a course in photography, while I studied painting. They showed me their pictures, and I was mildly interested. But then, one day, I was shown a book of prints by the photographer Aaron Siskind. His photographs were so close to what I was doing in painting that it took my breath away. Siskind really hit me hard; he made me realize that someday I would take up photography seriously!"

Before graduating, Jay joined three of his fellow students on a trip around the country to look at various samples of American architecture. When their 1960 Rambler rolled through Texas, the 23year-old Dusard was dazzled by the Western landscape. "All this wide-open country, the dry riverbeds, the land forms, I could not believe my eyes!" As the young men rolled on into Colorado, Dusard was overwhelmed and thoroughly hooked. As he later wrote of his trip: "... Space, magnificently articulated by form, relief, light, and unbelievably clear atmosphere, took on a new sense of continuity. Never before had sculpture, painting, and design merged as landscape! Never before had I felt so alive!" Dusard knew then, that he would have to come back to this wondrous country.

There was yet another important impression in store for him. As a small boy, Jay had been an avid listener of programs like Gene Autry and the Lone Ranger, radio's noble men on horseback. He even wore the gear that went with this era, down to the toy six-shooters and chaps.

At a small cafe in Safford, Arizona, where he and his college friends had pulled in for a break, a real-life cowboy ambled up to the counter. Says Jay: "I kept looking at that man and found that I really envied him. I wanted to be like him; I desperately wanted a chunk of what this man had!"

After earning a bachelor's degree in architecture, Dusard joined the Army and opted for a post in Texas because he wanted to be in Cowboy Country. After a few weeks, he made friends with a rancher who ran cattle on the military installation. Jay bought a horse and saddle from the man and spent all his free time working cattle.Toward the end of his tour of duty, Dusard volunteered for an Army course at the University of Arizona in Tucson, to explore the landscape that had touched him so deeply. After spending several weekends on a ranch near Douglas, Arizona, Jay was offered a regular job as a cowboy after his discharge. Much to the dismay of his family, the trained architect punched cows for $7 a day but was happier than he had ever been. As he said later, "It was the most exciting thing I ever did, and I would not miss these months for anything!"

Dusard worked on and off for architects around Arizona but spent more and more time on horseback. And he also took up photography in a more serious way. Largely self-taught, he worked with a 4x5 camera, photographing landscapes in Arizona and Utah, attempting to capture the magic that stirred his soul so powerfully. When he met Prescott photographer Frederick Sommer, Jay asked for comments on the prints he had made so far. Sommer was critical of Dusard'swork but interested enough to invite him to come to Prescott. Under Sommer's tutelage, Jay not only became a full-fledged photographer but also a teacher at Prescott College.

Dusard acknowledges his debt to Sommer with emphasis. "Everything of any consequence that I know about photography, I have learned from Sommer!"

In 1970, Dusard photographed his first cowboy, after concentrating on pure wilderness up to then. "I had seen two books about L.A. Hoffman, a commercial photographer who worked in Montana in the 1870s documenting cowboys on the range. Given my fascination with that subject, it occurred to me I could do something like that. After all, I had better equipment than Hoffman ever had!" It was, in fact, an ideal convergence of all of Dusard's preoccupations: the West, cowboys, and photography - all of these elements controlled and directed by his sense of design. Almost as a by-product, an invaluable document of an aspect of the American West would result. He proposed to portray the men who had inspired entire generations throughout the world with their independence, their valiant duels with the thundering herds of semi-wild animals, their competence in a lonely archetypal struggle between man and beast.

The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation saw the logic in this proposal and awarded Jay Dusard a prestigious fellowship. And he was off on his quest.

Looking at Dusard's prints, his choice of material becomes understandable. Black and white film gives him a broad range of tonal differences that color film does not provide. Arranging the elements of his subject matter on the ground glass is a natural component of the art of photography, but Dusard does not stop there. In fact, he considers his negative merely a blueprint for his final task, which is the painstaking work in the darkroom. The final photograph takes shape there, as the artist balances the light and dark shades, emphasizing now a highlight, now a shadow, until an inescapable order emerges, an artistic inevitability of contrasts and texture. In the parlance of photographers of Dusard's caliber, a picture is not "taken," but it is "made!" Snapshots may be an act

(Right) Dusard “making a picture,” ignores his curious equine audience, content just to watch the show. Harry Redl of pilfering from reality, but Dusard's work is arrived at by constant judgments and hard labor. The photograph is no longer a likeness of a given scene but a personal statement by the artist. The 8x10 view camera provides Dusard with an area large enough to impose his will on, it gives him a maximum of freedom for injecting his creativity. Says Jay ruefully, “I dread the thought of having to go into the dark-room because from the click of the shut-ter on it is mostly agony!” Where the act of creation ends for most practitioners, Jay Dusard's labor begins.

It is morning now, and we are on our way to the V 7 ranch in Chino Valley, about 30 miles from Prescott. Dusard intends to photograph Betty Wells, who together with her husband Bill - runs the cattle spread. Born on a nearby homestead, Betty has been working horses and cattle all her life and thus qualifies for Jay's series of portraits.

On either side of the dirt road, a vast expanse of grama grass, dotted loosely with diminutive buckhorn cholla cacti, stretches toward the rim of the valley where the Wells ranch nestles. Leaning back against his camera cases, Jay ruminates on his favorite subject: cowboys.

“They are a very separate group of people,” he says. “I consider them the aristocrats of the working culture. It is important to them to operate from the back of a horse. It gives them a sense of nobility, almost royalty. I suppose it all started with the Spanish tradition of the caballero, the man on the horse. He is elevated, removed from the rest of the crowd.” Although there is cohesion among the cattle workers of North America, Jay has discovered three distinct subspecies:

“The vaquero of the past was the flash-iest of them all,” says Dusard. “A lot of silver on their saddles and bridles, spurs and leggings. Today's buckaroos are slightly toned down but still more orna-mental than cowboys. They use a 65-foot length of rope where the cowboys use around a 35 foot. Buckaroos use leather saddlehorn wrappings, and the more pragmatic cowboys use pieces of inner tube to increase the hold for the rope. (Some tie their ropes hard and fast to the saddlehorn.) While the cowboys wear long chaps down to their boots and sober dress, the buckaroos sport 'chinks' (short chaps), reaching just below the knee, and plenty of silver ornaments.

slightly toned down but still more ornamental than cowboys. They use a 65-foot length of rope where the cowboys use around a 35 foot. Buckaroos use leather saddlehorn wrappings, and the more pragmatic cowboys use pieces of inner tube to increase the hold for the rope. (Some tie their ropes hard and fast to the saddlehorn.) While the cowboys wear long chaps down to their boots and sober dress, the buckaroos sport 'chinks' (short chaps), reaching just below the knee, and plenty of silver ornaments.

“There is an inherent respect among all those people for each other,” Dusard notes. “But when you talk to a cowpuncher, you realize that in a subtle way, he feels superior to everyone else. It never deteriorates to arrogance, though!” Are all those colorful men doomed by mechanization? comes the question. Jay Dusard emphatically dismisses the possibility. “As long as people eat beef, and we have the open range in the West, there will always be a need for a man on horse-back who knows what he is doing. There is a parallel to the role of a soldier in an atomic war. No matter how sophisticated warfare becomes, there will always be infantry. The cowboy is here to stay for the foreseeable future, thank God!” We have arrived at the V 7 ranch, and Betty Wells has a pot of coffee going. She is the epitome of the ranch wife. Capable, hardy, and possessed of a deep love for the country and her animals. Jay passes an hour exchanging bits of news, discussing colts, prize mares, and grandchildren. He feels very strongly that this is part of his picture-making, the rapport with his subjects, the lining up of personalities. Dusard hates to be an intruder in the lives of the people he photographs. “Sometimes I feel so guilty because it seems almost as if I were using them for my own design ends,” Jay worries. Betty, however, seems to consider it a worthy endeavor. She changes into her work clothes, gathers a clutch of puppies, and leads the way out to the corrals. Jay meanwhile has unloaded his equipment and has been scouting the ranch site for likely locations. After establishing the weathered side of a saddle barn as his background, he frames the scene in a cardboard cutout, which gives him the dimensions of the picture, and sets up his tripod.

The lens is selected, the camera is aimed, the image composed, the exposure determined, the film holder inserted. Betty is posed just as some dogs frolic into the picture. Jay is tense, going over an interior checklist like a jet pilot.

One picture is made and everything appears right. But a pup moved too vigorously for the long exposure time the camera needs. Dusard, patient but hurried, finds a piece of bone to keep the dogs occupied, then quickly readjusts some rope, checks the light again, and makes another exposure.

Betty is earnest and almost working now. She recognizes the deep concentration of a fellow professional and gives him all the cooperation she can.

Finally, it all falls into place. The dogs are right; Betty, regal and calm. Perspiration stands on Jay's brow as he calls out: “Hold it now, that's perfect!” He presses the plunger of the cable release, and the session is over.

There is a palpable sense of relief as Dusard strikes his equipment, talks soothingly to the puppies, and thanks Betty for her patience.

Jay Dusard has once more forced his will upon a set of circumstances, has gathered random pieces of reality and squeezed them into a frame measuring 8x10 inches. To make this effort meaningful, he will now have to face the long rigors of the darkroom. Dusard looks spent just thinking about it, as he gathers his material together and loads his cases into the car. But there is an aura of satisfaction about him too. He has just made another picture.