Joseph Cyr works as a language teacher at an American secondary school. He was born in South Korea, and spent his childhood living across Germany and the US, in Georgia and Arizona. “As an adult I have lived in Seattle, Paris and Nicaragua before moving back to Arizona,” he says. “I took this in Saguaro national park, on the edge of Tucson. It’s about an hour north of the US-Mexico border.”
It was a school holiday, so Cyr was doing a trail run when he took this image. His route was quiet; he saw only a few people on horseback and this saguaro cactus. The largest cactus in the US, it grows only in the Sonoran Desert, where the Saguaro national park lies.
“They can grow as tall as a six-storey building and live for more than two centuries,” Cyr says. “Their first arms don’t usually appear until the plant is 70 years old.” This particular example has a rare mutation: “According to the national park service, among the estimated 2m saguaros in the park, only about 75 crested saguaros have been found,” Cyr adds. “One can’t help but anthropomorphise these plants – their silhouettes often look like people with outstretched arms. This cactus looks as if it’s proclaiming, preaching, pointing outward and upward.”
The scale of the cactus is awe-inspiring, Cyr says, but it is also testament to the fact that nature can be a source of humour. “Not everything is ‘sublime and majestic’. It can be awkward and whimsical, but still leave us with our jaws open.”