For more than forty years, Jim Krantz has photographed the American West, and for much of that time his images circulated without his name attached. His commercial work for Wrangler and Marlboro helped fix a certain idea of the cowboy in the public imagination; artist Richard Prince later appropriated his photographs. Frontier, Krantz’s first monograph, sets that familiar iconography beside a more personal body of work. Published by GOST Books in 2025, the 144-page hardback gathers 98 images made across four decades.

The book is constructed as a sequence rather than a survey. It opens with closely cropped black-and-white frames of a charging bull and a horse and rider, classical in their stillness yet conveying the action unfolding in front of the camera. Color then enters: portraits and landscapes reworked with resin, wet paint, and light, so that the depicted scene and the made surface press against each other. Krantz’s staged herds, choreographed at scale in remote settings, follow.

The close is quietly exacting. Black-and-white images of the man-made West—a white house in the desert, a bedroom decorated with pictures of horses, a Pepsi sign—give way to a rattlesnake, a final figure for the volatile danger that the myth smooths over. Krantz writes that the frontier names the boundary between the known and the unknown; the book holds that boundary open instead of settling it.

The publication arrives as working farms and ranches in the United States decline and as aspects of daily life grow further removed from the conditions the myth describes, making the book a resonant homage to that fast-disappearing myth. Its key contribution is making visible, for the first time, Krantz’s individual vision of the harsh beauty of the American West, beyond his widely seen commercial vocabulary.