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Sheepherders & Buckaroos

Deon

Member
My wife and I moved to a small remote community high in the mountains of the Great Basin Desert to create art. We lived in Eureka, Nevada (population 300-600 depending on the price of gold) for 13 years. Trish and I operated an art gallery on Main Street (US-50 the Loneliest Road in America) for 9 of those years. We lived in the back of an 1880 bank building, operating our gallery out front (US-50 frontage). The local folks started out friendly enough, but it took over three years before the anyone felt comfortable to invite us out on their ranch to make photographs. Then out of the blue a local (matriarch) rancher invited us out to photograph their traditional way of branding, buckaroo style. Everyone wore traditional garb, no motorized anything, brands red hot in a fire, no propane and kids eating Rock Mountain Oysters right off the fire. This was super fun visual excitement! Then word got out we are not from PETA and we wanted to document/photograph traditional Buckaroo/Basque ways before they are gone. Local ranchers started to ask if we wanted to attend brandings, then a 300 mile cattle drive across Northern Nevada and lastly the Basque community invited us out to document a traditional sheep sheering, although most of the hands where Peruvian.

I'm really more of a landscape photographer, usually shying away from pointing my camera at people. But, when they ask you really nice and want you to climb right into the pen and get dirty with everyone, it becomes super fun. As you can see I'm really not very good with people, I'll stick to inanimate objects, people and animals move to quick for my eye to design very well...

All images Hasselblad 501C/M w/60mm f=3.5 CF Distagon lens and Ilford FP-4 film. I do all my own lab work all the way to digitization. Here is a super small sample.
independance.jpg


martin.jpg


sixmile.jpg
 
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