Each spring,
photographer Adam Jahiel leaves his home in northeast Wyoming and
treks to the remotest corners of the Great Basin to photograph
cowboys on their annual roundups. The seasonal journey has become a
10-year personal quest. Jahiel, whose photos have appeared in
The New York Times and National
Geographic among others, says he is racing to capture
traditional ranch life before it vanishes.
“I’m
in love – in love with the land, the isolation and the physicality
(of cowboying),” says Jahiel, who grew up in the Midwest. “I want
to leave behind a record of this fast disappearing
world.”
Through Sept. 7, Jahiel will be
exhibiting part of that photographic record at the Ucross
Foundation Art Gallery in Clearmont, Wyo.
Jahiel
was first drawn to ranching during an assignment photographing
rodeo bulls for the Sacramento Bee. While on the
ranch, he toured a bunkhouse; its stark furnishings and spare form
captured his imagination and ignited a
passion.
Jahiel has a clear idea of an authentic
cowboy. “If someone is wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and a
baseball cap and is driving a truck, I won’t photograph them,” he
says. Instead, he seeks out ranching outfits that practice methods
little altered from 100 years ago; many of his subjects spend weeks
camped out in the basin’s rugged landscape, glued to a
horse.
Jahiel is grateful that he started
photographing when he did: “Every year the crews get smaller and
younger.” Recently he returned to a favorite site “in the middle of
nowhere,” only to see a radio tower sprouting out of the
ground.
For more information about Jahiel’s
photographs, visit www.adamjahiel.com or call the Ucross Foundation
Art Gallery in Clearmont, Wyo., at 307/737-2291.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Disappearing cowboys get exposure.
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