More than a decade ago, Stephen Collector began photographing brand inspectors throughout the West. This simple curiosity gradually became an obsession, resulting in Law of the Range, runner-up as the best Art Book in the Rocky Mountain region. Collector's goal was to achieve the portrait as landscape, and to know the landscape and its people. His black-and-white photographs document beautifully a part of the West missing and presumed dead. However, rustling is not entirely a thing of the past, and the profession of the range detective did not die out with Tom Horn. Collector's fifty duotone portraits of inspectors, with short biographies and a dozen detail shots, are wonderfully enriched by Annick Smith's evocative and informative introduction. This is indeed the portrait as landscape, and though the landscape may be irreparably altered by progress, the souls of these men endure.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Freelance photographer Collector reveals a "western everyman's tale" in the weathered faces of brand inspectors and range detectives who pursue cattle rustlers. Over the past 11 years, he gathered 50 duotone portraits of these veteran cowboys and heard their stories of growing up, building homes, rodeoing and cowpunching on the range. "I saw . . . the business side of cowboying," he writes. "There was nothing romantic about a guy working the stock pens." Smith, a freelance writer, notes that brand-inspecting can be a thankless task, since ranchers are reluctant to prosecute thieves; Collector's subjects rarely smile, and their visages reflect lifetimes of hard work. Unfortunately, the biographical captions outline the men's varied histories only vaguely, and anecdotes are few. Tenderfoot readers understand that these hardy men love the unforgiving range and its inhabitants, yet we are left with little feel for the American West.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"...clear, straightforward black-and-white photography that embodies documentary photography at its best..." -- LIBRARY JOURNAL
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