Straight West: Portraits and Scenes from Ranch Life in the American West

by Verlyn Klinkenborg, Lindy Smith (Photographer)

Straight West is a book of ninety exquisite and moving black and white photographs about the deep interior of the American West, a place whose people are defined by their relations to animals and the land. The country of Straight West is enormous, stretching from the Mexican border to Montana, but it is also intimate, a matter of heart as well as geography. Lindy Smith's moving, powerful photographs capture a world that is too little known, a landscape of ranch-work, self-reliance, and hard-won trust, a place as much defined by dogs, sheep, cattle, and horses as by humans. As Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in the accompanying text, "there is no place in America like the ranching West for enunciating what it means to come from outside - outside the West, outside the ranch-life. And Yet there is no place in America more welcoming when you make it clear that you understand the call of the work at hand, no place where the work itself is more social...because so much ranch-work is solitary by nature, any work that can be done with friends and neighbors, like gathering cattle, becomes not only a neighboring but also a gesture of cultural solidarity. It contains a degree of formality - a sense of how things are done - that is easily lost on outsiders." This is a book that no one who loves the American West, or fine black-and-white photographs, will want to miss. (b&w photographs, 101/4 x 101/4, 120 pages)

120 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. His previous books include Making Hay, The Last Fine Time, and The Rural Life. He lives in upstate New York.

Reviews

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of Western photography took a while to grow on me. It took reading Verlyn Klinkenborg's brief essays introducing each section to help me see them in a way the photographer, Lindy Smith, seems to intend. Smith clearly shows us a West stripped of the mental imagery and expectations that urban dwellers and non-Westerners bring to the subject matter. There's an absence of stereotypes and calendar art. Instead, there's an attempt to capture the everydayness of life in the West - an everydayness that's recognizable on the surface, but different the longer you look at the pictures.

Smith makes an effort not to idealize the life of Westerners. They are first of all working people. They have jobs to do, and the work is hard, much of it outdoors in fierce heat, stormy weather, and bone-chilling cold. Their clothes are worn, and often there is a worn look on their faces. It's a world of men and women and children and one that includes horses, dogs, other animals and wildlife. As Klinkenborg points out, living and working with animals produces a person with a very different kind of self-awareness.

The pictures were taken in the 1990s. All of them (I count 89) are black and white, an attempt no doubt to avoid prettifying the subject matter with color. Most of them were taken in Wyoming, some in Montana, and other states, although in most cases, the landscape has an unusual sameness. There are interiors of barns, shots of working with cattle and horses in corrals, shoeing horses, mending fence, sitting on fences, lying in the grass, riding horses, hunting, droving and inoculating sheep. Some people stand or sit for the camera.

A favorite of mine is a simple picture of Klinkenborg himself on a horse, backs to the camera, both of them looking to the right over a grassy Colorado field fenced in with barb wire. Beyond is a broad lone tree, maybe a cottonwood, silhouetted against an unsettled, overcast sky, and in the distance along a flat horizon, the pylons of high-tension power lines. It captures many of the themes of the book. I recommend this collection of photographs to anyone with an interest in the real, new West.