Jay Dusard, while living in Tucson, Arizona, and working in architecture and cartography, St Louis native Dusard started photographing. A year later he was working in publishing and regularly aiming his large-format cameras at the landscape. He met photographer Frederick Sommer, who became his mentor and paved the way for him to teach photography for seven years at Prescott College.
A 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship freed Dusard to pursue the working cowboy, buckaroo, and vaquero as a photographic subject. The resulting body of work was published in The North American Cowboy: A Portrait (1983). His second book, Open Country, was awarded third place in the 1994 Photographic Book of the Year competition.