Jay Dusard

Jay Dusard, of Douglas, Arizona has photographed the quiet, subtle aspects of the landscape for thirty years, yet he is most well known for his portraits of cowboys. This is a direct result of his first book, The North American Cowboy: A Portrait, the product of a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship. Following the publication of that classic book, Jay published La Frontera, a collaboration with writer Alan Weisman about the U.S./Mexico border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. Following that, he published Beyond the Rangeland Conflict: Toward a West that Works, a collaboration with writer Dan Daggett, is proving to be a pivotal book in the history of land stewardship in the West, detailing examples of outstanding ranching practices designed to improve the land, the livestock and the wildlife. The book was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Open Country, published in 1994, features additional landscape studies. His latest book, Horses, is a small-format book praising those wonderful creatures that have been such an integral part of the West for centuries. He pursues photography—mostly ranching and cowboy themes again—when not busy doing ranching work or playing his cornet in jazz groups.