Over the past 4 years I’ve had the great fortune to spend time with working cowboys (men and women) all across the American West and I still find it hard to overstate how different they are from the rest of earth’s population. This ongoing journey started on family ranches that eventually led to historic properties larger than the entire state of Delaware. Describing these people and their way of life is hard. It’s a little like going to the moon. Unless you’ve been there yourself, how could you truly know? So it’s become my mission to take viewers behind the scenes into a profession that has gone greatly unchanged for the past 100 years. Their unique culture is built on deep respect for the history of the craft, personal pride in one’s abilities, and a love for animals as well as the land.
From everything I gather it seems as though the general public is drastically misconstrued about what a cowboy is and does. Despite being one of America’s greatest icons, most people see them only as characters in a movie and never think twice about the beef they pick up every week from the supermarket. A few years ago I was eating the continental breakfast at a shitty hotel somewhere in the midwest. The local news was the only noise in an otherwise soulless room. After finishing her daily drivel, the newscaster got in a loud huff “you are not going to believe what I’ve got for you today…….a real life cowboy!!!!” Speaking like he was an alien that came down from space and now walked among us humans. And maybe it’s not entirely her fault, because cowboys don’t exactly coexist with the rest of the world. They generally live hours from anything resembling a modern town and practically speak their own language with a vocabulary that becomes harder to grasp as it changes from region to region. They use alluring words you’ve never heard before like latigo, concho, and tapaderos. Listening to them talk makes you wonder if they are even from the same country, so you’re playing catch up before the work even begins, which always starts far before the sun bothers to show itself. And I’m convinced that one of their many superpowers is seeing in the dark. After breakfast is done they head out on horseback to work cattle in vast remote pastures and might not come back until it’s dark again, no matter the weather. 365 days a year the work needs to get done. Everyday they willingly log thankless mile after mile through mesmerizing land that very few human beings will ever see. At any point they could find themselves 10 miles from headquarters doctoring sick cattle during a blistering hot summer day in Texas. Or delivering calves through the night when it’s so cold in Montana that the new born baby will stick to the ground and die if it’s not immediately cared for. From an outsider's perspective it might just seem like grunt work, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Cattle don’t raise themselves then magically show up on your grill as hamburgers. They are animals that live in harsh environments and are susceptible to relentless weather, drought, injury, predators, and a long list of diseases that we couldn’t begin to understand. So knowing the nature of cattle and learning to raise them the correct way is a delicate science that’s elevated to art by some. There is so much that can go wrong when working with wild 1300 pound animals. It’s one of the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs in the country, but to them it’s a way of life that just happens to come with a paycheck. In fact, if money were no object, nothing would change. They’d still wake up everyday with a passion to work their ass off so that the world can stay fed.
If you’re a photography or art collector looking for a new piece of wall art to decorate your home, office, or commercial space please contact me directly. All of my cowboy photography is available as fine art prints in varying sizes - rob@robhammerphotography.com