Kendall Nelson: Home On The Range
Lynne Eodice, June, 2003
Several years ago, singer Paula Cole posed the musical question, “Where
have all the cowboys gone?” Apparently, photographer Kendall Nelson has
the answer. In her book, Gathering Remnants: A Tribute to the Working Cowboy,
Nelson delivers a starkly beautiful pictorial essay on the lives of cowboys
who live on working ranches in the American west. For about three and a half
years, she actively participated in the working cowboy’s lifestyle, routinely
starting her day at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m.—“in all kinds of weather,
from hot to freezing temperatures.” It’s easy to see that her work
went beyond simply documenting life on the range with a camera. “I didn’t
just go and shoot pictures out of my car,” Nelson laughs.
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Following the grazing cattle, the buckaroo pitches his cowboy
teepee in isolation.
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Her book is an honest portrayal of cowboy culture, offering insights that
could only come from someone who lived among the cowboys and has great empathy
for them. People may assume that the American cowboy, who ropes cattle and rides
the open range for a living, disappeared long ago. But Nelson—and Felicitas
Funke-Riehle, who wrote the text for Gathering Remnants—are here to tell
us differently. This book shows us a glimpse of those who lead a simple, but
rugged life that’s unaffected by the busy, urban world. “We all
know that there are cowboys,” she says, “but we don’t realize
that they’re still living in bunkhouses or running chuck wagons.”
“These guys are disappearing—their way of life is changing, and
I wanted to capture a little of it before it’s gone,” Nelson says.
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Cowboys are guided by instinct. They rely on faith and experience
to know what is true.
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Best of Both Worlds
Nelson was educated at San Francisco State University. “I got a B.A. degree
in art, with an emphasis in photography,” she says. After graduation,
she attended Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara. She felt that her diverse education
gave her “the best of both worlds,” as aesthetics was the strength
of her photo education at San Francisco State, while Brooks taught her the technical
aspects of the discipline.
One day a professional photographer came to speak at Brooks, and Nelson decided,
“Okay, that’s it—I’m going to work for this guy.”
She called him from a pay phone, and landed her first assisting job. From there,
she assisted other photographers in the Los Angeles area, and then became an
assistant to an executive producer of television commercials. This led to a
job in 1996 as an assistant director of the NFL pre-game show comedy spots for
Fox. Nelson was also a segment producer for a children’s baseball show
called “In the Zone.”
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The elements leave their marks on men who spend their lives outdoors.
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She decided to move to Idaho, as she loved the skiing there. “I thought
I’d only stay for a month,” she recalls. Nelson’s family had
a condominium in Sun Valley, and she had intentions of commuting back and forth
to Los Angeles to work. But, once in Idaho, she says, “I only produced
one Budweiser commercial, and that was it.”
A Vanishing Culture
Between football and baseball season that year, she went to Texas, and decided
that cowboys would be great photo subjects. To Nelson, they represented American
icons with a lifestyle that was diminishing. A friend who photographed for National
Geographic gave Nelson the name of a cowboy who lived outside of Fort Worth.
He invited her to see the inner workings of a ranch near Kent, Texas, where
they ran a chuck wagon. “That got me hooked,” she says. “I
really saw how cowboys lived, and decided then that it would be a book someday.”
Nelson returned to Los Angeles to finish up the baseball season in ’96.
She moved to Sun Valley in the winter, and began contacting working ranches
in Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, and Texas. She got referrals from cowbosses
out on the range, and thus began her project. “It was a big shock, going
from the sophistication of L.A. to ranches that sometimes had no electricity,”
Nelson points out. Although she says that she originally viewed Sun Valley as
a rural area, “it was like a mini-Aspen by comparison.”
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A herd of fresh saddle horses smoothly circles a cowboy upon return
to camp at dusk. The cowboss will choose and rope mounts for the
next day of dusty cattle work. The other horses will rush back
into the night and graze freely.
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Today she admits, “I don’t feel totally at home in either place.”
Instead, she says she finds her balance dividing her time between the stark
simplicity of the cowboy ranches to the relative luxury of Sun Valley. But when
she settles into the culture of the skiing town, she says, “I miss the
honesty of the cowboys—riding horses, working all the time—they’re
truly caretakers of the land.”
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