A beach in the Sonoran Desert sounds like a contradiction, and Butcher Jones is the answer to it. Saguaro Lake is a reservoir on the Salt River, and its shoreline gives you genuine sand, shallow water, swimmers, and, for years, horses walking through all of it as though the people were scenery.

That combination made the site locally famous and heavily visited, and it is the reason these particular horses have since been moved elsewhere. Which is the harder half of this story. A wild animal that is comfortable around crowds is not automatically a wild animal that is safe around crowds, in either direction. Horses that learn to associate people with food stop keeping their distance, and a horse that doesn't keep its distance eventually meets someone who doesn't understand that it weighs half a ton. Relocation away from the busiest recreation areas is a management response to exactly that.

So this photograph is a record of a specific arrangement that no longer exists in this place: horses and swimmers sharing a beach on a reservoir in the desert. The horses are fine. They're simply somewhere quieter now, which is very likely better for them, and it does mean this is a picture of something you can't go and see any more.

On printing this one: the pale sand, bright water and strong Arizona light give this one the highest contrast range in the gallery, and it's the most conventionally cheerful image of the set. Glossy metal suits it: the reflectivity that would be wrong for a misty subject is exactly right for a beach.