John Langmore’s account of cowboy life recalls the sounds and smells of a working herd: cows and calves calling to each other across sagebrush and juniper, cattle scent carried on dusty wind, the feel of a good horse beneath him. He knows that terrain firsthand. He began cowboying in 1975, at twelve, the same year his father, Bank Langmore, published the photobook The Cowboy. Twelve summers followed on horseback across the West before he pursued a professional career. In 2012, after three decades away from the saddle, he began a six-year project photographing fourteen of the nation’s largest and most famous ranches, in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming.
Open Range was published by Twin Palms in November 2018: 144 pages, ninety tritone plates, hardcover, 14 by 11 inches. The horizontal format gives a reader room to consider the people, animals and land within this project. The publisher credits the text to Langmore, and the book sets his own recollections of the work alongside the images. The relationship between doing the work and photographing it years later is an important part of how the project can be understood.
The photographs can be approached through the relationship between labor and place. A ranch is a landscape, but also a setting in which people work with animals and with one another. Langmore’s earlier experience provides a context for looking at those relationships. The book joins his photographs and writing, allowing recollection to accompany the later act of observation without requiring the two moments to become identical.
For readers interested in contemporary American photography, Open Range offers a particular connection between subject and author. The photographer returns to work he once knew from within, carrying that experience into a different role. A reader can attend to the images as photographs while also considering the remembered practices behind them. The book holds together these different kinds of knowledge: what is seen during the project, and what is recalled from an earlier life.
