Black Cacti
Over the next few months a number of new web pages will be going up on my website. This will include both two assignment oriented still life pages, and blocks of work from BLACK CACTI, an extended series of typologies from across all the major deserts in North America. This series of ongoing, interlocking and overlapping typologies dates back to the late 1990s. The organization within each chapter of the project is based upon three differing strategies; a census of an emblematic species, circumnavigations of notable landmarks, or linear transects that subdivide a landscape into a series of smaller more intimate, and sometimes chaotic, landscapes.There is a lot of complexity surrounding all of these projects, both in shooting and organizing the work. When I exhibit this work, it is exhibited in large grids of 40+ images, that are a minimum of 30" x 40". As so many people now look at work on their phones or IPADs, a grid of forty plus images images would be close to impossible to view on such devices, so these typologies will be put up in pages of nine images much like the other project work on my website.
The name BLACK CACTI, besides being the umbrella name for all these desert typologies, is in fact the name of the first of these projects. In the mid/late 1990s, I spent quite a bit of time working on two book projects all over the U.S.. The first of these projects was geologically oriented, and the other project was a botanical project. My art direction was pretty specific for these titles, but still left me some room for interpretation. One of the ideas we were playing with was having both black and white and color in the same publication. Accordingly, one camera was always loaded with Kodachrome, and another was always loaded with Scala, a high contrast black and white slide film AGFA had developed. When we actually got into the edit phase of the project, generally the landscape photos that were selected were in color, but the macro/detail images selected were mostly black and white.
The BLACK CACTI were actually stumbled upon while editing down the saguaro cactus arms for the project. We were very interested in how no two saguaros branched in the same way. The first thing we noticed was that selecting color images was really difficult because no two cacti actually had the same green color, so my editor suggested working with the black and white versions of the arms instead. By removing the color we were left with very strong use of line against a close to pitch black sky, thanks to a dark red filter. We selected two of the photos for the publication, but it was obvious looking at the light table that we had close to a completed typology.
While I had been looking at a lot of typological work prior to working on these projects by the Bechers, Ed Ruscha, Robert Flick, and Thomas Ruff, it was never my intention to work typologically. Up until that point, I usually worked on projects where the edit was for the most high impact version of an image. Besides that image, the rest of the images were either sent to my stock agency for possible licensing or thrown away.
Pretty much from that point forward until the present, this has become my preferred conceptual approach in my personal work. It is very affective at making the invisible visible.
The breadth of the project became almost immediately apparent, and for about five years, I primarily worked on censuses of plant species commonly associated with the desert; saguaro cacti, organ pipe cacti, Joshua trees and ocotillo. For about the last fifteen years, I have backed off on censuses except for an ongoing barrel cactus census, and been have working more on the spatial typologies. I think our sense of the American desert, is quite different than its actualities. The goal here has always been to clarify these spaces that most of us think of as wastelands as we drive through at 75 mph on the way to Vegas or Tucson.