Design and Concept
As many of you know, I am politely obsessed with saguaro cactus. Less as a symbol of the American West, than for their variation from plant to plant in height, color, width, number of secondary arms, arm position, arm shape, and surface detail quality. Saguaros vary as much as the human face; no two are exactly the same. In a certain way these photos are more portraits than natural details, or landscapes. Besides the black cacti group, there are also white and gray groups, but visually the black skies happen to work best for me against the gray scale value of the saguaros.
As the Black Cacti project clearly illustrates, where the secondary arms come off the main trunk, every situation is distinct. So of course, when I first started working on this desert cluster fifteen years ago, I was faced with deciding what type of crop would be most affective, along with decisions about depth, ratio of sky to cactus, tonality, contrast and gray scale value. To really explore an idea like this, the aesthetic almost needs to be decided upon in advance, so that when viewing the group as a whole, it reads as a continuous whole, and comparisons between the cacti can be easily viewed.
The key to this approach is letting go of a traditional sense of beauty where your intent is to create the most visually evocative single image. With the cacti arms the goal was to describe the nexus points in an inobtrusive way that keeps your eye on the cactus details. The dark sky is used as a contrast vehicle to allow your eye to really explore the form of the arms meeting the trunk, and not drift off into the background.
Actually, I have not really thought much about this idea in awhile, and it has only come up recently because I have been starting work on two newer projects; a trunk branching group, and a portrait group. To further develop this idea, I am going to use two trunk pictures to explore how concept drives creative decision. Above are two different photos from the trunk group where my primary concern is exploring the nexus points between the central trunk of a cactus and the points where the arms brach off of it. Right now, I am in the early phases of figuring out the design system, but one thing that has become clear is the whole group will be symmetric in composition. Issues around lighting and tonality have been slower to get resolved, but I suspect the group will either be done in total overcast light like the White Cactus photo that opens this blogpost, or in total direct sunlight, late in the day, with little or no shadow like the photo on the right above.
While the saguaro detail on the left is a far more pleasing as individual image, if we are trying to simultaneously view one hundred of these cacti, the flatter light found in the other photo above allows for far easier visual comparison. The strength in the individual photo above is how unique the open shadows are in the photo due to storm clouds diffusing the late day sun. Specific to southern Arizona, this is very rare late day light, and the only reason we have these open shadows on the cactus is storm clouds filtering the late day sun. With a little less cloud cover, these shadows would immediately revert to inky dense shadows that would actually detract from actually being able to easily view each cactus within the grid. In a typological setting, beauty's definition sometimes needs to be adjusted a bit.
