The primary time Ron Tarver received on an airplane was at age 24 to interview for a employees photographer place on the Philadelphia Inquirer. Subsequent factor he knew, the paper was sending out movers to his house in Oklahoma, the place he had labored for his first two years out of school as the primary Black photojournalist for the Muskogee Phoenix.
“It was identical to, an entire head journey,” Tarver, now a images professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, recalled in an interview with Hyperallergic. “I by no means lived in a giant metropolis earlier than … I assumed, wait, there are extra folks out right here than I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Tarver’s transfer from his house state early in his profession would finally lead him to seize the pictures that comprise his new guide popping out subsequent month. The Lengthy Experience House: Black Cowboys in America (George F. Thompson Publishing) paperwork the lives of America’s working Black cowboys, with an accompanying exhibition within the works. Lengthy earlier than pop-culture phenomena like Beyoncé’s 2024 Cowboy Carter album and Lil Nas X’s 2018 “Outdated City Street” celebrated the legacy of Black cowboy tradition, Tarver pushed for his or her recognition, typically unsuccessfully.
After reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer on a very grueling story of what he solely known as “the worst of human tragedy,” Tarver realized he wished to shift gears. “I used to be so depressed after that story,” he defined. “I mentioned, ‘For the following story I wish to do one thing that’s colourful, that has slightly little bit of pleasure to it.’”
In 1993, Tarver settled on photographing Black cowboys after seeing them “popping” out of Philadelphia’s parks. His editor on the Inquirer authorised his pitch, and after the picture assortment ran within the paper’s now-defunct journal, Tarver mentioned he acquired extra mail from readers than he had for any story he’d ever labored on.
After receiving a grant from Nationwide Geographic to proceed documenting Black cowboys, Tarver shot about 15,000 images throughout the nation, together with in Oakland and New York Metropolis, over the course of six months. Picks from these rolls make up The Lengthy Experience House.
When he set out, Tarver had no fastened methodology to seek out and {photograph} cowboys. For one picture, Tarver mentioned he requested round for an “Annie Oakley-type character,” which led him to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to {photograph} a lady named Betsy Bromwell. One {photograph} led to a different, after which one other.
“I used to be asking folks down there in the event that they knew someone who actually labored and lived the lifetime of a quintessential cowboy,” Tarver mentioned.
Within the 30 years since capturing this assortment of images, Tarver has tried to seek out varied houses for his work. Some success got here within the type of museum exhibitions, together with the Studio Museum in Harlem’s group present Black Cowboy (2016–17).
The Lengthy Experience House will debut in printed type almost 20 years after Tarver’s first images guide, We Had been There: Voices of African American Veterans, from World Battle II to the Battle in Iraq (Amistad Press, 2005). And there’s a purpose it took so lengthy.
When he approached publishers about his newest guide, editors questioned whether or not Black cowboys even existed. One editor, he mentioned, thought the topics of his images had been carrying cowboy costumes.
“And I’m like, ‘No, there are precise working cowboys out in America that make their residing on ranches,’” Tarver recalled.
Tarver himself grew up engaged on farms, and his members of the family had ranches in Oklahoma. He additionally discovered about Black ranching tradition via his Texan father, who was additionally a photographer.
Nevertheless it was via his conversations with the cowboys for this undertaking that he found analysis investigating the racist, anti-Black roots of the time period “cowboy” itself.
“Ranch bosses would seek advice from Black employed fingers as ‘boys,’ as in, ‘Get me this, boy, or get me that, boy. Get that cow, boy.’ So, the title caught. That’s my model and the model of a lot of the cowboys I do know,” Tarver defined in an electronic mail.
Regardless of earlier rejections, Tarver says he’s happy that the guide is popping out now, partly crediting the affect of Beyoncé.
“If this guide had come out once I wished it to, it will have been lengthy forgotten,” Tarver remarked.
Two exhibitions will accompany the guide: one held this fall in Norman, Oklahoma, and the opposite in fall 2026 on the Print Middle in Philadelphia.
If all goes properly together with his launch, Tarver needs to trace down the topics in The Lengthy Experience House who had been kids on the time and doc their lives 30 years later.
For now, Tarver writes in his foreword that he hopes his assortment of images will encourage readers to contemplate what he calls the “visible poetry” of Black cowboy heritage in America.