On cowboy culture of Hollywood-written mythologies

“American Cowboys,” on view at the Briscoe Museum of Western Art in San Antonio until late January, strips cowboy culture of Hollywood-written mythologies through a series of 100 black and white photographs. The exhibition reaches not for stories of valorous cowboys, wild brawls, or the enchanting landscape, but for modern people who inhabit the region. It’s a chronicle of professional pickup riders and ranchers in the ring and on the town.

With her camera in hand, the New York City-based French photographer Anouk Masson Krantz crossed the plains of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. During the 26-week-long study, she kept the locals’ routines, learned their rituals, and felt the adrenaline of rodeoing and ranching.

Across an upper-level open-air bridge at the Briscoe is a small black room with a video spanning an entire wall to greet the viewer. In it, Krantz travels dirt roads and vast ranges in a Rover before stepping into the scene. The introduction confirms Krantz was only a visitor, but that she grew to know the people and land intimately.

Wall text explains that “cowboy” is a descriptor — not a gendered term. It’s an occupation, the artist says.

“Welcome,” a photomural of a Black cowboy on horseback, framed in a car window, opens the main gallery. He wears modern eyeglasses and a watch, and his saddle and spurs are not ornate. The photograph captured him tipping his hat to the unseen passenger — a gentle “Hello” and sign of respect. This initial moment in the exhibition is the only instance where Krantz’s presence behind the camera is recognized. Otherwise, she’s documenting lives from a third-person perspective.

The moment between subjects in “Welcome” introduces past and present: the blood of cowboys from the ‘Wild West’ still runs in cowboys’ veins today. “Cowboying is the antithesis of evolution,” Taylor Sheridan writes for the exhibition.

The cowboy tipping his hat, juxtaposed with “American rancher,” a classic silhouette of a cowboy — also on horseback — prods at what the exhibition is on a quest to dispel. There are moments of cowboys staring wistfully into distances in the exhibition, but Krantz predominantly focuses on day-to-day life.

“Post Office,” is a scene of two men with long, sweeping, fringed chaps standing beneath the awning of an Old West post office — an image the imagination might create. The set has a small wooden chair crafted for a cowboy to watch Main Street before rising for a throw down and is surrounded by dry brush and a metal and wood scrap pile. The photo is a nod to classic Hollywood films for what they do get right — pageantry, flora, and all — and could be mistaken for a still from an old flick.

“Saguaro” is another more staged image. It shows a rider on horseback next to a cactus about three times his size. Krantz confirms brush can be nearly the size of a horse, and sometimes mountains are only a rigid sliver in the distance.

Around the corner are scenes of mundane life. “Dinner Date” features a couple perched on a tailgate — trailer hitched — in a parking lot, with the McDonald’s golden arch looming above them.

A photo-op is tucked in a corner to “picture yourself in the west,” as you don a hat and hold a rope. The Instagrammable moment is unexpected considering the authenticity Krantz strives to show throughout the exhibition. It’s reminiscent of buying a custom-fitted Stetson in Austin, on South Congress, to wear just for a weekend or picking from the small, adobe hat shop during your day trip to Luckenbach. All hat and no cattle, people say.

A buffalo soldier’s 1904 leather saddle hangs in the middle of the gallery, and a Zoetrope (spinning pinwheel) shows frames of the first video ever captured, “The Horse In Motion,” (1873). The array stresses life many Americans have completely fallen out of touch with.

Near the camera and props is a series of studies of otherwise unsuspecting characters: Youth Olympic skier turned rodeo cowgirl Paula Cooper stands, rope in hand, in a barn doorway in “Cowgirl.” Professional surfer and documentarian Chris Malloy stands in pressed jeans and boots in his surfboard-filled barn.

In a handwritten letter alongside her worn boots, hat, and chaps in a case, she explains how she needed to begin to look the part to be accepted there, but the uniform turned out to be necessary to withstand the roughness of the West. The boots, denim, and hats protected her from “God-knows-what,” she wrote, and served her much better than the European sneakers, jeans, and linen shirt she first arrived in. Dressing the part and virtually becoming a hand, “…helped [her] to appreciate and better understand the extent of this culture that most of us have no knowledge exists,” Krantz said in a video.

Unlike parachuting in for a series of photoshoots, she would wake up and finish her days in the dark. Krantz’s work is akin to photojournalism or the photo collection of an ethnography.

In a daytime still, a college-aged girl is perched on metal barriers of a rodeo ring with a backdrop of cascading hay bales. Her denim clothes are pressed and starched, and her enormous, stylish chaps hang. With a Coke in hand and her cuffs rolled, she’s resting, but ready for her next round in the ring.

Photographs side by side show small-town nightlife: A woman, dressed in bellbottoms and her hair curled, slips into the door of a saloon. A man leans across the long pool table rail to take a shot. This is the place to go for a splash of whiskey to wash down trail dust, and there are probably booths full of folks slugging beers, sharing tales of their days.

There are gargantuan prints of animals, that some people from metropolitan cities might’ve never seen so close before. One of the largest prints in the gallery shows two women in an old — but pristine — car. Another woman cooly drapes her arm over the open door and talks with them. They’re in this seemingly empty place where land and sky are endless, but there’s a close-knit community. “As I spent the time and the effort to listen and understand their lives,” Krantz said, “I realized that there is much more to them than the stereotypes that have been perpetuated by Hollywood. In fact, it was quite the opposite.”

The ranching lifestyle is the “fabric of who you are,” said Lindsay Branquinho, a California rancher Krantz met in Arizona. A small print of the first photograph of the man tipping his hat closes the exhibition. Unlike all other photos, this final artwork has no mat. It's casual and suggests that the viewer might now understand his life is more than the trope.

Perhaps as a European photographer, this series of roping, wrangling, and extravagant clothing comes from a curiosity about a reality that could have been, had her family made it to the “frontier” about 200 years sooner. No matter the reason, it’s a display that unfurls clichés known and loved worldwide. These photos are far from Krantz’s New York City and France, and even distant from Texas cities — outside the Briscoe is a bustling metropolis. But in her photos, out in the West, fringe still sways, dust dances, bulls buck, and smiles tear across wind-burned skin.

She dedicated the exhibition “to the American cowboys, who represent the greatest virtues of American heritage. May they forever remain steadfast and true.”