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

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.

This is a wonderful visual description of the disappearing west that many of us know from folklore and honest movies. Lindy has an uncanny knack with the black and white photo and delivers a perspective that very striking and makes one think deep thoughts about what is a "cowboy." The book is the epitome of a coffee-table book and will spark many a constructive conversation.

Straight West seems to me to be the real west--people, animals and landscape in work clothes. Both text and pictures spoke to me of real people in real places doing real work and living real lives. How refreshing after a lifetime of Hollywood's version of The West. I found certain of Smith's pictures--Looking Toward Mexico, Going After Cattle, Sheep Convention, Ranch Cabin, and Dude Ranch String, to name just a few--so compelling I keep turning back to them, wondering about the stories they tell--or don't tell: the stories they are hiding, waiting for the reader's imagination to flesh out. Klinkenborg's essays are a valuable part of the book. I especially liked the artist-at-work explanations he gave of his wife's labor over developing and printing the photographs. It is really a book to treasure.