It’s troublesome to overstate the importance of the determine of the cowboy within the self-conception of the United States. As photographer Ivan McClellan places it, “The cowboy represents independence and grit and resilience, and all of the noblest traits of the American myth.”
Yet it’s an iconography from which Black individuals have usually been excluded, regardless of this being ahistorical: in response to an article within the Smithsonian journal, one in 4 ranch employees within the pre-Civil War Southwest was Black, and the time period “cowboy” itself is rooted within the racist observe of addressing grownup Black males as “boys” (their white counterparts had been usually known as “cowhands”). “To have Black people excluded from [the iconography of cowboys] says that Black folks aren’t resilient, aren’t gritty and aren’t independent,” says McClellan, who has been documenting Black rodeo tradition throughout the US, principally in Oklahoma and Texas, for over ten years, and whose new e-book, Eight Seconds: Legacy in Motion, is revealed by Damiani. By photographing Black topics within the regalia of the cowboy – the hat, the chaps, the boots, the buckle – he hopes to “elevate that Black figure to the level of mythology […] to take well-trod ground and just disrupt the hell out of it”.
McClellan had at all times been fascinated by all issues Western. He would go to rodeos as a toddler, however it was actually movies that obtained him enamoured with the determine of the cowboy. His favorite movie rising up was Tombstone, a 1994 Western starring Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, a personality who’s each dying of consumption and, as McClellan places it, “the most badass cowboy you’ve ever seen in your life”. Yet, whereas there’s a wealthy custom of Black Westerns, Black individuals had been largely absent from the movies he noticed rising up, and he hardly ever noticed any Black individuals in his personal life who resembled the characters he encountered on-screen.
“It wasn’t until I got invited to a Black rodeo in 2025 that I realised this was very much a part of my culture, and also very much part of how I grew up: there were people down the street from us who were raising cattle, but I didn’t acknowledge them as cowboys because they were Black,” he tells Dazed. “But at this Black rodeo, I saw thousands of Black folks, and they were wearing basketball shorts, Jordans and gold chains, and there were women riding horses with braids blowing behind them and acrylic nails clutching the reins; there was R&B, gospel and hip-hop music coming out of these horse trailers; there was smoked turkey legs, chicken and strawberry pop. It was the perfect marriage of all of the things I had seen in films growing up with all of the things that I knew about Black culture growing up.”
When McClellan first entered the world of Black rodeo, he didn’t know anybody. “I was wearing chinos, wingtips and a linen shirt – I couldn’t have fit in any less,” he says. “But people were as curious about me as I was about them, and I just started jumping in people’s trucks and driving places.” One reminiscence that stands out is when he met a person named Sticky Hayes and his father, who took him on a hours-long street journey outdoors of Houston to promote a bull. “They were chewing tobacco and spitting it into a large McDonald’s cup and singing country music, which I had never heard Black people listen to before – that always felt kind of forbidden to me. They were just so joyful and in their element; they had a stranger in the back seat, and they couldn’t care less.”
Most of McClellan’s topics have by no means been photographed earlier than, and are “wildly uncomfortable”, he says, with the prospect of getting a digicam shoved of their face. When he arrives at an occasion, he’ll depart his digicam in his automotive, get out and simply begin speaking to individuals for nevertheless lengthy it takes them to really feel comfy. After that, he tries to shoot shortly. “For me personally, I hate getting photographed – it’s the equivalent of torture – so I try to move really, really fast. I try to get the whole thing done in 15 minutes, and then we can go back to being friends,” he says. Creating that sense of ease and luxury along with his topics is, for him, his guideline as a photographer.
As properly because the Western movies he cherished as a toddler, McClellan attracts on an eclectic vary of visible influences. His greatest supply of inspiration, he says, is the photographer Carrie Mae Weems, who “depicted Black life in an almost uncomfortably intimate way – you see people in their dining rooms, you see people in their personal spaces interacting with their children in a way that feels almost invasive”. He additionally admires the author, photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, who wrote The Learning Tree and directed Shaft, and the painter Kehinde Wiley: “The scale of [Whiley’s] work and his disruption of traditional elevated European aristocratic portrait by putting Black street figures in these positions has undoubtedly inspired my work. Every bit of media that I read or consume ends up in my photos in some ways,” he says, pointing to the symmetry of Wes Anderson’s cinematography or how, in Martin Scorsese’s movies, what’s happening within the background is simply as vital as what’s happening within the foreground.
There’s a vivacity and color to McClellan’s pictures which counsel a vibrant scene. But whereas this can be true of any given occasion, the tradition of Black rodeo is definitely “in rapid decline”, he says. “People are less reliant on local produce and local farming, and young people are less interested in jobs in agriculture, and as you see the population ageing pretty rapidly, with fewer and fewer of these cowboys existing every year,” he says, including that he could be stunned if there are any Black cowboys left in 20 years. These issues exist throughout the board, and are affecting white cowboys too, however he suggests it’s “more accelerated” in Black communities due to a larger lack of assist from the federal government, together with larger difficulties in accessing loans and monetary subsidies.
While altering financial situations are driving the decline of rural life, McClellan suggests {that a} lack of curiosity or data amongst youthful individuals performs a job too. This is the place he hopes his work would possibly play a job in conserving Black rodeo alive. “We do large events in the middle of cities, like Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon. I think that’s the first time that a lot of city kids have ever seen a cow or a horse, or seen a real cowboy,” he says. “And so, exposing young people to this world, getting them to fall in love with it, is probably the most critical piece to making sure this culture can thrive for another generation.”
Eight Seconds: Legacy in Motion is revealed by Damiana and is obtainable now.