The saguaro cactus grows only in the Sonoran desert in the US state of Arizona and across the board in the Mexican state of Sonora. Individual cacti may grow as tall as fort feet and live for more than two hundred years. After about seventy years the cactus may grow arms. They are magnificent plants, and walking among them gives a sense that they have a presence that is undeniably human. For centuries people native to the desert have considered saguaros to be the souls of lost ancestors.

I included the cacti in photographs as soon as I moved to Arizona in 1982. Then sometime around 1987 I started to make a series of what I considered to be saguaro portraits. I would find a cactus that interested me and walk around it, examining all sides. I made photographs of entire plants from a similar distance, showing top, bottom, and arms. The series was originally given the name Desert Citizens.

I would put the photographs I made in a drawer, and after about twenty years I had several hundred saguaro negatives. I thought of the work as a kind of typology and felt that the photographs needed to be seen as a group rather than individually. I had occasion to show them in groups of five or more, and some early saguaro portraits appeared in the book Revealing Territory. In 2007 the book Saguaros was published and included about seventy black-and-white saguaro photographs.

I expanded the original black and white series of saguaro portraits in 2012 to take advantage of the color range that can be captured by a large format digital sensor. These saguaros are selected from hundreds of photographs made since, and printed in several sizes ranging from 7x5 feet (213x152cm) onto heavy fine art rag papers creating a very detailed saguaro image that’s close to human scale, to a more intimate paper size of 11x8.5 inches (27.9x21.6 cm) using handmade Japanese tissue papers that emphasizes the subtle variations of desert light.