VaqueroVaquero
The format is horizontal (12x8.75"), perfectly accommodating the format of most of photographer Wittliff's 94 stirring sepia-tone images, which were taken some 30 years ago on a cattle ranch in northern Mexico. He provides minimal yet evocative text in his afterword, and author John Graves provides an introduction describing the proud life of Mexican cowboys; but the photos are the heart of the book and will engage those who have directly experienced the desert's heat, light, and terrain, and the rough life of working with animals, as well as those who marvel behind a camera or a canvas, or from the seat of an armchair. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
In the early 1970s, noted Texas historian Joe Frantz offered Bill Wittliff a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—to visit a ranch in northern Mexico where the vaqueros still worked cattle in the traditional ways. Drawn to this land-out-of-time again and again, Wittliff photographed the vaqueros as they went about daily chores that had changed little since the first Mexican cowherders learned to work cattle from a horse's back. In the tradition of the great cowboy photographer Erwin Smith, Wittliff captured a way of life that now exists only in memory and in the pages of this book. Here you'll find photographs that reveal the muscle, sweat, and drama that went into roping a calf in thick brush or breaking a wild horse to the saddle. Wittliff's evocative text recalls the humility and pride of men who knew their place in the world and filled it with quiet competence. John Graves brings his own memories of the vaqueros to the text, writing about the kinship between the vaquero and the cowboy and about how "the old, old ways," which Wittliff preserves in these "lovely and meaningful photographs," still tug at the modern imagination.
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- Austin : University of Texas Press, 2004.
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