A Stint as a Rodeo Queen Led to Career in Photography

BY KAREN BOSSICK

Jules Frazier had deliberate to maneuver to Manhattan to pursue a profession as a style photographer after graduating with a level in pictures from the Brooks Institute of pictures in Santa Barbara, Calif.

But, three weeks after she’d bought her automobile and put a deposit down on a New York residence, fellow Sun Valley ski bum Sarah Thomas dared her to enter the rodeo queen contest for Hailey’s 1985 Days of the Old West Rodeo in hopes of profitable the money prize.

It was the primary rodeo Frazier had ever attended, however she rapidly realized the horsemanship, public talking and rodeo terminology aspiring queens had been requested to know. And, when it was over, she was carrying the queen’s tiara.

This {photograph} was utilized by Stetson in its advertising and marketing.

“Basically, you’re the marketing arm of the rodeo so you need to know how to ride a horse and talk on a horse,” mentioned Frazier, who grew up exhibiting horses.

Frazier’s probability foray into the rodeo enviornment, after 5 years of residing in Sun Valley, diverted her consideration from the style runway to the world of horses and cowboys and cowgirls.

She started coaching her lenses on cowboys and cowgirls, particularly rodeo queens. And that led her to capturing Western landscapes, ranches, rodeo contestants, previous neon indicators and cowboy motels and fading glimpses of the west, together with a sagging barn the place riders with the Pony Express exchanged steads.

She turned referred to as a distinguished superb artwork photographer and her pictures ended up in adverts for Stetson and Wrangler, in Cowboys & Indians Magazine and in artwork collections throughout the nation.

Jules Frazier found this lonely tree close to Fairfield.

She simply got here out with a five-pound espresso desk ebook, “Faded Icons of the West,” that accommodates 250 pictures taken over 40 years and hundreds of miles from quiet desert cities to rodeo arenas.

And she will likely be at Saddletree Gallery in The Courtyard in Ketchum from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 8, to debate pictures from her “Faded Icons of the West” sequence and her “Mountain Chic” modern tackle ski tradition.

Saddletree Gallery proprietor Jerry Hadam mentioned he was first drawn to Frazier’s work due to her rodeo pictures however then turned wowed by her landscapes, which embody the previous Corral Store close to Fairfield whereas it was nonetheless open, rock formations in Monument Valley and barb wire and fence posts close to Mountain Home.

“I admit I’m a little jealous of some of her landscape stuff—the openness, the spareness,” Hadam mentioned. “She even took a photo outside the Lookout Restaurant on top of Baldy that she calls ‘the parking lot.’ She took it when everyone goes into the lodge during midday, and there are skis everywhere and not a person in it. It’s a really cool shot.”

Jules Frazier shot this {photograph} of younger ladies celebrating fortieth celebration on the base of Warm Springs on Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain.

Frazier takes images of winter blizzards and previous western motels on transparency movie utilizing her classic 4×5 Calumet, 2.25 Hasselblad Nikon and Cannon cameras. She’s dubbed a few of the pictures in her ebook “Blue Tone,” as she processed them with slide movie chemical substances for a blue tone within the days earlier than picture store.

“I loved the rodeo fashion because it was so authentic and so back in time. Earlier, they wore polyester western suits. Now, there’s more leather with buckaroo-styled long chaps.”

Frazier has taken portraitures of rodeo champs and cowgirls at a rodeo queen reunion. There’s even a cowgirl in watermelon-green coloured chaps in entrance of her yellow and blue house that needs to be seen to be believed.

Some of Frazier’s images depict the altering West. There is, as an illustration, a shot of a cowboy carrying a hooded sweatshirt, a rip in a single aspect, fairly than the normal button-down cowboy shirt. Another picture taken on the Pendleton rodeo in 1988 reveals stable white throughout the grandstand, because of cowboys carrying white shirts and white straw hats.

Vanishing relics like this are immortalized in Jules Frazier’s assortment of images.

That grandstand can be a hodgepodge of colour right this moment, she mentioned.

Frazier loves classic, a throwback to her mom’s modeling throughout the Sixties. One of her images, as an illustration, encompasses a champagne bottle positioned within the fur-covered moon boots of a pair many years in the past.

She posed lots of her rodeo queens standing on pink, white and blue oil drums and others towards curtains that she makes use of for backdrops.

“It’s not about them looking pretty but, rather, authentic,” she mentioned. “Some did barrel racing. And a lot of these girls went on to be sportscasters.”

SADDLETREE WEST

Jerry Hadam just lately expanded his gallery in The Courtyard, at 360 East Avenue, into former area occupied by Fine Arts photographer James Bourret

“I’m calling it Saddle Tree West because it’s to the west of my main space. And we’ve got a bunch of western images in there this summer,” he mentioned.

“James was in the space, then he got back into doing architecture more. A feather artist took it over. Then, he had a baby and it was too much for him. Now, with Sun Valley Contemporary moving in across the way, we have four galleries in The Courtyard.”

In addition to Jules Frazier’s works, the gallery additionally options a wide range of different artwork, together with trout work by Mike Pepper impressed by the trout at Silver Creek Preserve. Check out the Arapahoe man’s marriage ceremony vest whereas there, too.