The American cowboy is both a figure of myth — rugged hero astride a horse, taming the wild frontier — and a historical reality: a man hired to herd and protect the cattle that were a large part of the western economy. The hero, as portrayed in popular culture, may never have truly existed, but the cattle herder never went away.
Growing up in France, photographer Anouk Masson Krantz was fascinated by the cowboys she read about in books and saw in films. After she moved to the United States as an adult, she made trips from her home in New York to the vast western part of the country, driving two-lane roads through endless stretches of ranch land on a quest to learn more. “I wanted to see how these American cowboys live,” she writes, “how they work, what they love about their lives that keeps them here, what they aspire to achieve. It was difficult at first. Many of these ranchers — private and skeptical of strangers — did not have the time or interest to share their lives with me. What was I doing here, and why could I possibly be interested in them?”
But some allowed her to photograph their lives — and even briefly become a part of them. “I had to roll up my sleeves and step into the thick of their daily routines,” Krantz writes. “I rode with them on horseback to help corral their herds in sweltering desert brambles.” The experience quickly dispelled the misconceptions from her childhood, and she grew to know and appreciate these people who have kept a nineteenth-century culture alive here in the twenty-first.
The photographs on these pages were selected from Krantz’s book American Cowboys, published in September 2021. They appear here by permission of the Images Publishing Group (imagespublishing.com).
— Ed.
