New West Book Review

“Still”: Robb Kendrick’s Cowboy Tintypes

By Jenny Shank, 8-04-08

Still: Cowboys at the Start of the Twenty-First Century
By Robb Kendrick
University of Texas Press
232 pages, $50

The West’s open range cowboy era that has been so romanticized in American myth, film, and books endured only for a short period during the 19th century, before fenced land became the norm, but photographer Robb Kendrick has devoted his career to capturing contemporary cowboys who look as though they’ve stepped right out of those legendary times.  Kendrick doesn’t costume his subjects to fit a role, unlike famous frontier photographer Edward S. Curtis (as Marianne Wiggins notes in her astute introduction), but he does have a great eye for men and women whose dress, faces, and demeanor make for an iconic look when he captures their image in a tintype, a photographic process that reigned in America from after the Civil War to the beginning of the 20th century.

Wiggins, who met the photographer several years ago after admiring his work in advertisements, writes, “There is no way, really, to talk about what a cowboy does and who a cowboy is, without first talking about beef,” because the onset of cattle drives (in the wake of the destruction of the buffalo) is what gave rise to the cowboy’s occupation.  Wiggins writes:

“All the cowboys Robb has photographed for this collection work on…grass-fed operations, running herds in what Robb considers more faithful to the traditional way of cattle rearing.  This is a conscious decision on his part and is not meant to imply a prejudice against the industrialized feedlots (which still require working cowboys on horseback to patrol the pens), but more a commitment, just like the antiquated equipment and method he has used to make the images, to an older, less artificially enhanced way of working, living, and putting life in focus.”

Although Kendrick captures a diverse group, they all seem to be settled in their skin, proud of what they do—I don’t know if working on grass-fed operations has anything to do with his subjects’ poise.  The first-person narratives of cowboys interspersed throughout the tintypes back this impression up.  Don Lock of Nevada’s Van Norman Ranches displays an enthusiasm for his work that is typical: “It’s really neat in the mornin’ after it’s rained at night and you get up and you smell the sagebrush…Everything’s fresh and clear and the sun’s peakin’ through the clouds and you get on horseback and go somewhere.”

These narratives capture a unique cowboy way of talk.  The cowboy flavor is not based on slang so much as it is on an individual’s particular attack of a sentence, such as when Justin Johnson describes his impression of his father working a colt when he was six years old: “That horse was jumpin’ really high and dad was gruntin’ and groanin’ up there and I knew right then that, you know, that was darn sure a man’s job.”

Along with distinctive voices like Lock’s, Still acquaints the reader with some great faces, such as those of Faithe and Merlin Rupp, a sun-baked pair from Oregon. Mr. Rupp has evidently taken great care to cultivate his long and complicated moustache, and grips his lasso and his wife with equal vigor, but Faithe’s steel glare makes it apparent who wears the Wranglers in the family.  Harli, Ashley, and Katelyn Cota—sisters, I’d guess—from Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada, project a confident swagger with their fringed chaps and canted hips that would be the envy of any tough cowboy.

Sometimes Kendrick includes multiple images of one person, and it’s usually evident why he has done so.  Some of these people have faces or body language so iconic that you just want to see them in another pose.  Monique Miller of Miller Cattle Company in Montana is formidable with her arms crossed over her chest, wearing an outfit of fringed buckskin.  In the next plate, she’s posed with David Miller, and her attitude and face are softened, their forearms touching, her stature less imposing in part because she’s a good foot shorter than he is.  Clint Damewod of Oregon’s ZX Ranch is captured on and off his beautiful pinto.  In both photos his hat is tipped so far forward that every feature above his nose is obscured.

The tintype seems to render a subjects’ eyes more haunting than contemporary methods, from the fathomless brown eyes of the aged Jr. Knight of Duck Valley Reservation, Nevada to the popping blue eyes of Daren Westlake of Babbitt Ranch, Arizona. Mistakes (or purposeful experimentation—I can’t tell which) can also be striking, such as the smeared tintype of Nevada’s Chet Bartlett that erases his face but leaves the ghostly impression of his hat.

Toward the end of the book there’s a tintype of Trey and Conner McGowan, two cowboy urchins with earnest looks on their faces.  It’s easy to project them forward ten years, when the baby fat will be weathered off their cheeks and they will emit a confidence as assured as that of the other men in the book.

Robb Kendrick’s Still is the product of an ideal match between photographer, technique, and subject matter, and the tintypes it collects demonstrate how much more compelling reality can be than myth.

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