 Good evening. Good crowd. My name is Robert Whalen. I am a public programs manager here at the Barnes Foundation, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the blissfully air conditioned space here at the Comcast Auditorium. We have a wonderful lecture in store for you tonight with a distinguished artist, and it's my honor and privilege to introduce him tonight. Photographer Ron Tarver is here to discuss his work documenting the life of the African-American cowboy. Mr. Tarver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer whose work has been featured in notable publications, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Inquirer Sunday Magazine, National Geographic, Life, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and Black and White Magazine. In addition to his photojournalism, he is co-author of the book We Were There, Voices of African-American Veterans, published by Harper Collins in 2004, which was accompanied by a traveling exhibition that debuted at the National Constitution Center here in Philadelphia. Professor Tarver's photography has been exhibited nationally and internationally in over 30 solo and 50 group exhibitions, and is included in many private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg, Oklahoma Museum of History, and the National Museum of Art of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He received a BA in Journalism and Graphic Arts from Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, and currently serves as a visiting instructor of photography at Swarthmore College and is in his final year overseeing the MFA program at the University of the Arts. Professor Tarver's work has spanned many genres, including sports, photojournalism, fine art, and architecture, but some of his most striking work has been that examining the lives of African-American cowboys. By showcasing African-American riders, Professor Tarver has aimed to demonstrate the rich history and vivacity of African-American cowboy culture, while also showing that being an African-American cowboy means surviving discrimination, racism, and prejudice. His photographs of these communities elicit powerful responses that echo Mohamed Borouisa's current exhibition, Urban Riders. Professor Tarver will speak more to his experiences documenting these communities and individuals. Please join me in welcoming him to the bar. OK, people showed up. I thought it would be too hot, so. One little correction, I do not oversee the program. So, Cynthia, if you're out there, you're still my boss. So I'm actually working in my FA at UArts. So in my third year, so I've had about two hours sleep for the last two or three weeks. So if I stutter a bit, you'll understand what's going on. I also want to thank the Barnes. I'm so honored and privileged to have this opportunity to speak here. The Barnes is just, as we all know, just one of the most outstanding organizations and collections in the world. It's just fascinating. I want to thank Kathleen from pronouncing her name wrong. I think it's Deidre, maybe. Alida, Alia, and Steven for making all this happen. When I got an email a few months ago asking to speak at the Barnes, I thought, this is a joke. But yeah, so it's a really honor and privilege to be here. I was thinking about this whole thing about black cowboys at the Barnes. And how does that work? And I thought, well, it took me a while to get my head around why this is here, why the show is here. And I thought, if Dr. Barnes was here, he would be high five in everybody, I'm sure. Because his vision for his collection was to be a living thing. It wasn't to be in some stuffy institution where the pictures just sort of hang on the wall and you walk by them in reverence and just pay respect to the images. His vision was to have these pictures almost like a working lab where he would rearrange things and put them next to things. And when you walk in the collection, you see it. We've all seen the Barnes. It's really a wacky kind of thing. I mean, he has hinges next to chairs next to priceless artworks. And he was constantly rearranging things. And I think, how does this connect with Muhammad's exhibition? And I think it's right up the alley of what Barnes would have done. Because this is contemporary art. When Barnes was collecting his work, it was at the forefront of art. I mean, the American art, we were still hung up on brushstrokes. We can't see the brushstrokes. And so Barnes goes over to Europe and brings these paintings back where they're just this wild impressionist kind of ideas about the human form and painting people that aren't beautiful and all these conventions that just flew in the face of American art and was panned by the art community here. But what he assembled is something that is second to none in the world. And so I think anything fits in the Barnes. Any sort of contemporary art sort of fits here. Because that was Barnes' vision for art, was to make connections with the viewing public, to make connections with community, which is exactly what that Muhammad's work does. It makes connections with a community that probably most people wouldn't see. Most people wouldn't go there if there hadn't been the horse day film. So there are all these connections with the way with Barnes philosophy and how that work fits into and makes connections with the price of collection that is here. My work takes more was I did this work for the Philadelphia Inquirer. This is the Sony magazine it ran in in 1993, actually, the year my daughter was born. And so my work is more journalistic in nature. It's not so much conceptual. But my goal was to tell a story about not just black cowboys, but that whole experience that blacks have and the connection they have with the West. I grew up in Oklahoma, so if you hear a little bit of a twang in my accent, that's where it's coming from. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma and grew up around horses. And really didn't think much about the fact that there were horses in our backyards and my neighbor's backyards. It was just the way it was. We didn't necessarily wear cowboy hats or I wore cowboy boots and learn not to wear cowboy boots when you're around horses because you slip a lot. So having that experience growing up in horse land and my grandfather that you'll see later was working cowboy, all those experiences, I guess I didn't really appreciate until I moved out here. And when I started working on the story and after the story ran, I had just worked on a big, long project on drugs in North Philly. So I just come off this and I thought I need something that's going to sort of pull my head back into reality that the story that I'd worked on before was all in black and white. And I wanted something that would be in color and to sort of because I usually don't work in color. So and I had known about the black cowboys here. And I thought, well, I'll just do this. It'll be a three month project and I'll get it out of the way and move on to something else. Here we are in what is it, 2017 and it's still hanging on. I did the story for the Inquire Cindy magazine. We got more letters for this, that story, than practically any other story I'd ever worked on. It was amazing. And the responses were, we didn't know that there were black cowboys. I'm like, what? How could you not know that? And so it was so overwhelming that I went to my editors and I said, well, why don't we do an extended story on black cowboy life across the country? So let me give me six months to work on this thing. Well, kind of in six months because this ran in October. So no, it ran in July. So yeah, I think I asked them for six months. So they cut me out for six months. And I went out and I found stories all across the country in Illinois and Oakland and Texas and all over the country and pulled out stories, pulled out a whole series of stories for Black History Month that month. And it appeared as a five-part series in the feature section over a week. So I got a chance to really sort of dig down into black cowboy life. And then National Geographic saw it and got in touch with me and said, we'd really like you to do that for the magazine. So they gave me a grant to go out and work on it for the magazine. I worked on that for maybe about six or seven months. When you're working for National Geographic, time just all kind of blends in together because you don't know. There were days that I woke up. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know what day it was. All I knew was I had a camera and I had to go out and make pictures of something. But it was an extended story. It ended up staying on their website for 10 years. And it was an amazing experience. And so here I am giving a talk at the Barnes about work that is still living, which I think I have about 2,000 rolls of film, slide film, with that. It still hasn't even been edited yet, a lot of it. Well, it's been through the Geographic edit. But I think there's another few edits that it needs to sort of be churned through. So let me get started here. I think I have the right button. Let me see. OK, all right. So I'm going to give you just a brief history of Cowboys. So I'm supposed to have presenters' notes. Are they not up here? Because I don't know what to say if they're not here. I don't want to touch anything because I know something would blow up. Is somebody back coming to help me? I could tap dance, but you wouldn't want to see that. I know they were having a few issues with some of the technology earlier. So nothing's showing up there. I could pull my laptop with that. OK. So I guess we could talk a little bit about what's going on in this image. I mean, this was a photo, a painting, 1966 of the carols, which Spanish Cowboys. And let me see if I can rely on my memory. I think the 1500s of Morsepix, 1562 or something, was when the first Cowboys appeared on the landscape. And they were primarily Spanish. They came up from Mexico. And in that, there were Mexicans. There were African slaves that were involved in that whole trade. And they herded cattle from Mexico, mainly in Texas. So a lot of the ranching and things like that were going on in Texas. Let me see if I can move through this. Some of the first ranches were the missions that were established in Texas, which actually was Mexico, actually, at that time, really was in Texas. And it's funny, we think of the missions as these places where they're sort of monasteries. But really, they were working ranches. There were sort of self-contained little satellites out there in the prairie. So they had to have everything. They had to have food. They had cattle. And they were huge. They were immense. They were like acres, hundreds of acres big. And they had to have cowboys to work those. So that was another job for a lot of cowboys. This was the document of Texas, not emancipation, but the establishment of Texas as a state. Annexation, right. I'm sorry. I'm doing all this from a very minor little part of my brain. But so when this happened, it created the migration of blacks out of Texas. The emancipation created the migration of blacks out of Texas to the north. I think the next slide is going to show you. A lot of them came along on these different trails. So you can see where these trails go. And my family settled in right around here in the northeastern part. My great-grandfather had a ranch in Texas. Actually, when he came, he was emancipated from. You need to see your notes. Oh, good. OK. All right. Figured technology decides not to work. Actually, I'll hold that for a second. Here's the scroll. OK. OK. Yeah, you're just going to have to scroll down here, but still advance it. OK. All right. All right. So let me see. So oh, so going back, how do I go back now? Don't I go? Anyway, you saw the p- I feel like a tap dance would be much better. So if I could go back. But I'm afraid to do this. But if you remember the picture of the Redbird, OK? The significance about that picture was in Oklahoma, there were 50 established towns, all black towns in the state of Oklahoma, which to this day is the largest established. There are more black towns in Oklahoma than any other state. And it's largely due to the migration of a lot of blacks through the, there we go, through the, from Texas. All right. So this brings us to my grandfather, Tommy Wilson. He's this guy here. He was a working cowboy. He drove cattle from Catoosa, Oklahoma to, let me see if I can get this thing going here, from Catoosa, Oklahoma to, which is in the northeastern part of the state, to from Fort Gibson, where I grew up, to Catoosa, which is about 80 miles. So that was what his job was. He was a cattle. And he also was a pretty good, from what I understand, a pretty good rodeo cowboy. He roped, he did roping and things like that. And evidently he had a really amazing roping horse. And if you know anything about roping horses, it's, they're really important because if you, when you rope a calf, the horse and rider have to be in perfect sync. The horse has to know what to do in order to tighten the rope up and to pull the cow back, so the calf back so you can tie its legs together. So evidently he had a really amazing roping horse. It's gonna, I'm gonna, this is a little out of sequence to the way I photographed it. This was during the National Geographic part of the shoot. But I did, I wanted to find a ranch that still had original black cowboys there. And I found a ranch, it was the Connor Ranch in Texas. I mean, it was one of these ranchers that, you know, this bigger than the state of Delaware kind of thing. And they had these cowboys that were still there. And this is Nathaniel Youngblood. Now, I'm sure all these men are probably gone by now, but he was 72 when I found him. And they still lived on the ranch. They still had bunks set up for him. And they had these amazing stories. Nathaniel was, told me the story that he had never been off the ranch before. He had spent his entire life on the ranch. And when the war came, World War II, they drafted him or he found himself on sitting on a beach shooting at planes as they flew over with banners in the back to test their ability of a merchant ship. And they gave him a high score and put him on the back of a gunboat. And he was out in the South Pacific shooting down Japanese planes. And he had this amazing thing. And then once the war was over, he came back to the ranch and that's where he spent the rest of his time. And that was his whole experience of, and I remember he summed up his experience of his marksman ship was from shooting rats around the pond. He said, yeah, you know, I can shoot rats around the pond and I can shoot down planes. So then this guy, K.J. Oliver, he worked on the McFadden ranch. It was 47,000 acres. And later on he came to the, oops, I'm sorry, I'm looking at this and him, K.J. Oliver. He worked on the McFadden ranch, 47,000 acres. And later came to the Conner ranch as a trail headsman. He was the guy that sort of made sure that all the herding was done correctly and everything. He, his quote that I asked him, so how long would you work? And he said they would work from can to can, which meant that they would work from can't see in the morning to can't see at night. And I thought that was really great. He said one time the weather was so bad that his job was to go around and break the ice that the windmills had pulled up for the, to feed the, to water the cattle. And he said it was so cold that he would break the ice on the, on one container of water. And by the time he had made it back to that container, it was frozen again. So he spent the whole day just breaking ice. So it wasn't pleasant. Living out there. This was Jesse Jones. He was born in 1916 near the San Antonio River. And he was known for his performance. He was evidently a pretty amazing cowboy performer. But he just had these amazing eyes. I just, that's the one thing that I really wanted to focus on. So that leads us up to the city cowboy. So like I said, I started this project in 1993. Wanted to show what it was like to just sort of be in with these guys. So I spent probably around three months maybe shooting these folks. This guy's name is Leo Hill. I followed him from his stables in the White House. Now, the stables that I photographed, I didn't photograph at Fletcher Street. So I photographed at a place called, it was called the White House, which was at 32nd and Master, which is now a, I think now it's a condos and maybe a whole foods or something, I don't know. But it's not there anymore. And so I followed a Leo on his ride from the White House to Fairmont, where he rode. And I just thought this was, I was hoping he would ride past this mural. This is in Strawberry Mansion and just to have that juxtaposition of these legends. This is the outside of the White House. Kids would come there and they would, to make extra money, they would, they would muck stables, they would wash horses and things like that. And so these two boys had just washed this horse and they were waiting for the horse to dry in the sun. You know, they would have these little impromptu parades where they would ride down Philly streets and folks would come out on their porch and they'd wave and they would be in full in all the cowboy regalia and would always draw a crowd. This photo was taken in Harlem during one of the, some of the Philly cowboys went up to meet some of the Harlem riders and they had another parade down the street. And it's sort of reminding me of riding through the canyons of Wyoming or, this is a barbecue. They would have these barbecues and kids would play and old timers would sit around and tell stories and there was always things going on. This guy, you know, I sort of traded in the six shooter for a beeper. You know, the Tim Gallon hat, you know, a lot of Tim Gallon hats. And this was outside the stables in Philly. So at the rodeo. So one of the things I did was traveled a lot with rodeo cowboys. I can't tell you how many days I spent in the back of a pickup truck riding from rodeo to rodeo. I spent some time with a small rodeo group. It was an association, it was called the Anowax Saltgrass Rodeo Association. And it was in Brownsville, Texas and in the northeastern part of Texas. And I would, you know, ride around and then we would go to rodeos. This was in Opmogi, Oklahoma. This was rodeo queen in Opmogi. Opmogi, Oklahoma has the largest rodeo in the country. It's like 10,000 people would show up for this rodeo for over four days. It was just amazing. And this is a picture of a father and son. It's a little pixelated, but father and son, they were dressed alike. This little kid, he was, his dad was a roper and he was playing with the ropes. When this was, actually this was in Texas. It was at the, I think the Texas stockyards. There was a big rodeo going on. You know, it's all family show up and everything. But he was, he was just this little man, you know? But what I really, what I loved about it was his belt buckle was about as big as his head. So, these are guys behind scenes at a smaller rodeo getting ready, you know? I mean, rodeoing is tough. It's a very physical thing. And these guys were pretty banged up. They would get beat up and, you know, mangled by, you know, horses and bulls and you name it. And there was a lot of behind the scenes sort of preparation just to keep their bones together so they could get on the horse and ride. This was at, this was in Oakland. I was in, this is why you do not want to wear cowboy boots when you shoot this because you have no traction. And I used to, I learned this the hard way because I shot a rodeo when I was working for, I worked for a small newspaper in Oklahoma. And I went out to shoot a rodeo and I wore my cowboy boots because you just kind of wear your cowboy boots. It's, you know, it's a thing. So, and I went out to shoot this thing and a bulls came at me and I turned to run. And it was kind of one of those cartoon things where your feet are spinning but you're not going anywhere. And that's when I realized, okay, you know, you wear cleats. And I looked around at all some of the other cowboys, some of the other shooters and they're all wearing football cleats, you know? So I thought, okay, noted chick. Another one. I mean, these bulls are amazingly big, you know? And I wanted to sort of get at that idea of just the power behind these things. You know, and I know that, you know, there's all these rumors that, you know, the bulls are mistreated and things like that. And these bulls are well taken care of because the people that own the bulls make their money, this is their livelihood. So they don't want anything to happen to these bulls. So, you know, I know we hear stories that, you know, to make the bulls jump, they put nails and things and straps and things like that to make them. I can, I have never seen that happen. These bulls are well trained. They're almost like the performance in themselves and the faster that they can buck the guy off, the more money the guy makes. So the more money the owner makes. And so these bulls are, they know what they're doing but they are, I can guarantee you, they do not care if they hurt somebody. Point in case, point in here, this guy got bucked off and the bull literally like picked them up and flipped them in the air. Another one, you know, it's a brutal sport. And you know, it's funny too because now if you see cowboys, especially rodeo performers, they have headgear on, they have football helmets, they have, you know, armor on. I was watching the, what is it called, the IFR International Finals, rodeo not too long ago and they don't even look like cowboys anymore. You know, they're all sort of armored up. One guy even had a football helmet with a cowboy hat on it. I thought, very cool. Yeah, you know, the horn is almost there. And you know, one of the things too is the dangers of getting your hand stuck. So if you don't tie yourself up properly, the idea is you want to be able to release yourself from the bull and when you get bucked off, but he tied himself too tight and the bull literally just drug them around the arena which brings us into the rodeo clowns. You know, you go to rodeos and you see these guys out and these guys really are the saviors of the bull, of the cowboy because when you have situations where the guy gets the situation, you know, like before this where the guy got stuck, the cowboy, the clown comes into play and pulls them off. I don't know, has anybody ever been down to the cow town rodeo? Yeah, yeah, that's, you got to go down there. It's, I mean, that is like the real deal. It's down in South Jersey. I mean, it's like you're entering a whole nother land when you go down there. It's really, it's really cool. Here he is where he pulled the guy off and he's protecting himself from the bull and they really put themselves between the bull and the cowboy. You know, it's sort of cowboy code that you don't, if somebody's hurt, you don't rush out immediately to help them immediately. You know, and now, you know, this guy obviously wasn't in danger from a bull or anything and he was shaking up. But I just thought of how casually the people in the background are like, well, we're just gonna wait and see if he's gonna get out, you know, because it's sort of like stripped something of your manly hood if somebody runs out and are you okay? You know, so you don't, you don't do that. If he eventually got it walked off, so. I also followed some people who, some women, women writers who worked in various jobs. This one was a stenographer in a court room. But I wanted to find people that was more, I wanted to find sort of this expansive look at not just, you know, men, but I wanted to find men, women, young, old, all kinds of stuff. So I found her, and this is her, you know, writing. She was amazingly fierce. I cannot tell you, she would, there's a whole series where she's writing around the barrels and if you know anything about barrel racing, the whole idea is you have three barrels set out and then you make a circle around each barrel and it's timed. And so the idea is you wanna get as close as you can to the barrel without knocking it over and then make the circuit. And she was, I think she won just about everything. She was just unbelievable. This is a little blurred motion action. You know, just not a big rodeo. This is, I think this was in Texas at the ANOX Hotgrass Rodeo Association where people would just show up, they would pass up the hat and put some money in the hat and, you know, whatever contest you were involved in, how much money was in the hat. If you won, that's, you got the money in the hat. So that's what's going on here. Scott was getting ready to go out and rope. You have team roping where one person ropes the front part of the calf, another person works the back part of the calf and then you get time for that. This is a little sequence here of this kid, you know, roping, I don't know how well you can see it might be a little too bright, but going through his emotions, really amazing. And then, so this guy, I found this guy in Oakland and he was practicing, so he vented this thing where he put legs in the back of a garden tiller and he would sort of fire the thing up and he would sort of putt around his arena with the legs would kick him and he would practice roping it, you know, so I don't know how challenging it was, but it was good practice, I guess. So I wanted to find sort of the quintessential Annie Oakley, I wanted to find the woman that sort of embodied the idea of what it is to be a female cow person and everybody told me that, you know, you have to find Betsy Bromwell, she lived in a little area close to Stillwater Oklahoma and so I found her, she lived in a trailer, I walked up, knocked on the door and she opens the door and she goes, who are you? And I said, well, I'm, you know, I told her always what I wanted to do, she was smoking marbles and drinking Jack Daniels and so I walked in and she said, sit down, you want some Jack? And I'm like, I suppose, you know, so we had a long talk sort of laid out what I wanted to do, I said, I want to spend a week with you, you know, everybody said, you're the person I need to see, you sort of epitomized the idea of the female cow woman and she was really flattered and let me hang out with her, so I spent a week with her. She was really amazing, I mean, she had, wait, oh, laser pointer, okay. One of her things was she wanted to be a, outside of sort of being this amazing cow person, this amazing horse woman, she wanted to be a golfer so she would get up every day and whack about 10 golf balls out into the prairie just, and they would fly out like, you know, 400 yards, I mean, she was just amazing. But then she would, her job was working in a cell barn so she would go and work and getting horses ready to sell and things like that, making sure that they were all shooed, she would shoe horses and things like here. You know, so it was a tough job. I mean, she would work from literally six o'clock in the morning till eight o'clock at night, mucking stables, doing all kinds of things. She would be exhausted by the end of the day. One day, somebody came up with this horse that they wanted to sell but nobody could ride, which is not a good thing. And so they brought, they took it to Betsy. Oh, by the way, that's, where's my, oops, oh no, how do I go back? Can we go back? Oh, well, so anyway, there we go. So I wanted to use that, you know. So that was, that's the way Betsy got around. She rode this motorcycle. So somebody brought this horse up that nobody could ride and Betsy said, you know, take it out of the stable. I mean, as they were pulling up, you could just hear this horse just banging on the sides of the trailer. And Betsy said, well, take it out of the trailer. Two guys take this thing out of the trailer. And she said, tie it up, you know, tie it against the post, which means, you know, just tie it up to the post. And she walked over and the horse was bucking everything and she punched it. I mean, she, I was like, you just hit a horse. And the horse was like, you know, I think the horse was surprised just as much as she was or just as much as I was. And she put literally put one foot in the stirrup and she's told the guys, let it go. And the horse just went berserk. And I'm out there running off my 24 millimeter lens, you know, just trying not to get kicked by this thing. But literally by the end of the day, I mean, she had this horse, it was like pussycat. You know, I mean, it was, it was amazing. I mean, she had this ability, it's almost like a horse whisperer where she could just talk to the horses and she was just really amazing. I also wanted to find sort of the quintessential sort of, you know, what we think of as a cowboy. Somebody that really makes their living on horses. Somebody who that doesn't really do anything but horsework. And I found this guy, David Cormier, who lived in out near Brownsville, Texas. And he was 21, really nice looking guy, just the nicest person in the world. He lived on a trailer with his, that on land that was owned by his uncle, who was actually a pretty well known cowboy in that area. But his uncle gave him, I think five or six acres where he had a couple of horses. His uncle also gave him a horse to ride to work. This is him putting on his muck boots to go to work. He would get up at six o'clock in the morning and he would have to go and catch his horse to ride to work. And this horse was just extremely crazy. I mean, which is why they gave him the horse. But it was, he would literally, I was, and I was sleeping in the trailer and my bedroom was in the back and I heard all this commotion outside and things were banging up against the trailer. And I literally jumped out in my underwear because this is like five acres of nowhere. And I'm running out with my camera, taking these pictures of him, trying to catch his horse to go to work. It was just crazy. And then once he got it, he would have to tie it up, put the saddle on it and ride it to work. And once he got there, he'd shoot horses. He worked the stockyards. He would sell pigs. Anything that would happen in a cell barn, that's what he did. He was also sort of this guy who people just looked up to. And little kids, this little boy was just, and totally enamored with David. And David was, he was just such a gentle guy. He was just amazing. This is him in the cell barn, some of the buyers, if you go to a cell barn, the buyers stand above and David's job was to bring the pig or the cow or the horse or whatever it was, bring it out and then they would do a bid on it. And this is him laughing, somebody making little jokes towards each other. Into the day again, this exhausting day. The tragic thing that happened was when I was out there, he had a wimp the whole time I was out there. And so I went to the doctor with him and they did MRI and I had spent this week with him and when I went back, I called him up and actually I called his mother up and or his mother called me and I said, so what's up with David? And she said, well, they found cancer in his knee. And so they ended up having to amputate his leg, amputate his right leg. And my plan was that I went back and this is during the geographic shoot and I went back and the plan was to edit all the film and then go back and spend another week or two with him. But by the time I got out, by the time that we had gone through the process, the cancer had metastasized and it had just spread all over his body and he passed away. And it was really, really, it's I still get kind of a shaken up when I see it. I mean, he was just, you know, just an amazing guy. They have a rodeo out there named for him that David called me a memorial rodeo every year. And I haven't talked to his mom in a while, but she used to stand touch. I should get back in touch with her just to see how things are going. But evidently, it's a pretty big annual event out there. This is a picture that I made of him and this is not Photoshopped. I mean, he was riding one day and this rainbow popped out and I just snapped the picture and I was like, I'm not gonna use that as too sentimental or whatever. But it just, you never know, you know, it just happened. But that was his life. So some of the people, you know, just throughout the day, I photographed this woman's wedding. She had a traditional wedding in Texas where she jumped the broom and had her wedding party all came up in a stagecoach. It was really, really cool. This was one of her wedding guests. She had a pig and she painted, oh, she painted the pigs with pink toenails. So this was her, yeah, this was her pet. You know, I wanted to focus a lot on men and their sons. I did a whole series of just men and their sons because, you know, it is a family event and these guys, you know, this is what they do. You know, and they raised their sons up to be horsemen just like they are. So I'm sure, I would love to find this little boy again because I'm sure by now he's gotta be in his 20s. You know, the races, this was in Illinois. You know, the thing about cowboy life is there's not a lot of sort of, at least I didn't find a lot of tension there. You know, it seemed like people got along pretty well. These guys were best friends. Okay, so I spent, I spent a lot of time, again, back at the Antelwax Saltgrass Rodeo Association and what they do at these things is so these are rodeos that they have. People literally have rodeos in their backyards. Like they may have like a, you know, a half acre rodeo arena in their backyard. But afterwards, after the rodeo, they throw some of the most amazing kick-ass parties you've ever seen. And they would last until like four o'clock in the morning and it would be 104 in there and this guy is dancing and doing splits. I mean, it was so, it was so hot that two of my cameras shut down. They just couldn't deal with it. But this guy was just amazing. He was, he was, I can't even tell. We drank a lot of beer that night. So I think, maybe I shut down. Maybe that's the way I remember that. I don't know. Just, you know, just because. It was just a pretty picture. Little boy in his horse. Actually, this is the son of Bumsy, Bumsy, Bumsy. What was Bumsy's last name? He was at the White House. His father ran the White House. And Bumsy Burwell, I believe. But anyway, his father ran the White House and he went to school on a rodeo scholarship and just a brilliant kid, amazing kid he would do. And I did a whole series on him where he would go to different events and he would, I spent some time with the African-American Museum where he was showing kids how to rope and how to do horses and things like that. How to take care of horses and things. Just an amazing kid, cute little girl. Cute little boy. This guy was on a ride in Texas. Just had this most amazing skin. Just really, I just, I don't know. I just thought, he just hit that profile and I made a couple of frames of it and then it went away. So these aren't great pictures, I'm almost done. But I just want to, I put these in because I followed, so in Texas, the Texas Stockyards have this huge rodeo every year. People from all over the state ride in to convene at this rodeo. And so I followed these guys from some little town way out in west Texas. It's about a 100 mile trip and they ride in on stagecoaches. And so they're riding along. This is out near Austin in the Hill Country of Austin. And so this is the time I shoot for Geographic. And the only reason this picture's in here is because it gives me the chance to tell a little story about when you shoot for Geographic, back then anyway, you had sort of the whole, everything that Geographic had offered. You had all the money, you had the, everything was at your will, all the equipment, everything. So I call them up and I said, I need the helicopter to shoot this thing because I really think that, I just want to get that expanse of Texas and this wagon train ride through. And I said, well, just find somebody. So I called up this, I looked in the phone book, there were two services, one I didn't trust, the other one was Bill's, it's even sketchy, but it was the lease of the sketchy of the two. And so I called him up and I said, I need a helicopter, I need to shoot through this shoot at a certain time. He said, well, meet me in this field at this time and we'll take you up. So I go to this field where he said, I'm sitting at this little pole barn and I see this guy coming up this dirt road and it's Bill with the helicopter in the back of his pickup. And I'm like, okay. And so he pulls up and he's like, so where do you want to go? I'm like, I want to go home right now. But he said, well, hop in. So literally it was about as wide, it was about that wide. It was a little homemade thing that he had made. And he literally starts this thing up and we take off from the back of his pickup and we're out hovering around out there. And the only thing I'm thinking is I want to go home, I want to just shoot this picture. And so I found these guys and they're coming down the road and the angle that I needed to shoot this at was there were a bunch of high line wires where I needed to be. And I mean, I was used to shooting aerials because we did a lot of that for the inquire, but we did it in like real helicopters, you know? And I knew that there were all sort of regulations. You can't get in Philly anyway. You can't get near, you can only get within 500 feet of a high line wire, whatever. And so it's like, you want to go over there? And I'm like, yeah, I know you can't, but we're yelling at each other. We're only like a foot away from each other. And he goes, oh, no problem. And so he literally takes us over there and he just sits us down in a triangle of high line wires. And I look over at the blade and the blade looks like it's coming within a foot of the high line wire. And literally I just cranked my camera up to the fastest it would shoot and I did, let's get the hell out of here. And so we went back, set the thing back in his pickup truck and I gave him five bucks for the ride or whatever it was and just split. So that's the story behind that picture. Another picture, this was a guy out near media that I spent some time with. And so to prove that I kinda did this when I was a kid, this is me actually roping a calf. So that's it. So any questions about anything? Talk some more. No, I didn't. I didn't meet him. I came to this lecture, but I didn't meet him. So yeah. Have you ever? That's a whole other thing. I had had a little bit of running with the guy that runs the Bill Pickett rodeo because he's very proprietary about his rodeo. So I chose not to follow that. Yeah, Bill Pickett was a, he was a famous, I'm not sure the dates. He was a rodeo performer and a very famous rodeo performer. His name sort of associated now with the Bill Pickett rodeo, but he was probably the most well-known rodeo performer there was. So that's sort of his, you know, in a nutshell. Do you have anything else you wanna add to that? True, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was the beginning. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is a whole other issue too. The rodeo hall of fame in Oklahoma City is very, in my opinion, a very controversial place. They've even renamed it now. It's called Museum of Western Heritage. So I think they had a lot of issues with that because my exhibit, when I was exhibiting this, it was suggested that my exhibit go there and they wouldn't take it. So it went to another, it was called the Fitzpatrick Center, which was down the street, which was another, it was sort of like the equivalent of our Science Center, but they wouldn't take it. So, which leads into other questions about, you know, segregation and, you know, what's included and what's not, and especially in a lot of different museums. Now this was 20 years ago, so things maybe may have changed, but if you've ever been to the Black Cowboy Museum, there was a lot of diversity there and there were a lot of things left out, especially, but anyway, I don't want to get too far into that, but yeah, but Bill Pickett was known for that unique style of using his teeth and things like that, but yeah, but the whole being excluded from the Cowboy Hall of Fame was a really bone, of contention for me and a lot of other people, so yeah. Sorry, please just wait for my guess. Yeah, yeah. What project are you working on now? Well, now I'm, my dad was a photographer back in the 40s and 50s, so I'm working on sort of reimagining his images and making them more to connect them to the present. So I'm actually, I'm doing things like collages, I'm collaging his work, I'm taking his work and cutting things out, cutting the images out and then building sets almost, like the last set I just built was, it's sort of a moon shape, but he had made some photos of a family that were, and this may have been even back in the 30s, they're very frontier-like, so I made this, it's in my studio at UR, it's, I don't know, 10 feet long and four feet wide, and I made it from work that I'd done back a few years ago called World in the Greener Sand of things that I had scanned to represent Hubble Space Telescope. So I wanted to have this conversation between my work and his work, so I had this photo of where I'd scanned the inside of a shell, but it looked like craters on the moon, so I made roughly like four by four inch pieces and collaged all those out on a big tabletop. This is like manic craziness, but so anyway, you'd have to see it, but so the whole idea is that these folks, these black folks have landed on the moon and you can see the earth in the background and it's sort of a little reference to what's actually going on now. So that's my intention is to work with his work to sort of reimagine those, and now I'm working in glass and doing all sorts of things and thinking how we remember, how people will curate their own lives, so I have one shelf of his images that I've incorporated the images into glass, and so they're arranged on the shelf, and I don't really know a lot of these people, but they're arranged on the shelf in the way, in sort of the same way that we would arrange things on our dressers, and my reference for that is my mom's dresser and the way she arranged things, so I'm thinking about how things are arranged, how things, how people remember, what's added, sort of the curatorial process of what's added in and what's taken away and the layers of those things and how the glass represents. You're looking through this glass, but it's also reflecting back at you and sort of the fragile nature of the community that he photographed in because that community doesn't exist anymore, so he used glasses almost as a metaphor for that, so it represents the resilience of the community, but it also represents the fragility of the community, so it's like I would have never thought I'd be doing this. Thank you, Cynthia, so I'm just working, and now it's turning into these big sculptural things, so who knows where it's going, but yeah, so that's what I'm doing now. Yeah. It's like what? I can't go, yeah, it's funny because it's really connected me with my father for it because my dad was a difficult guy. He wasn't, I mean, he never, you know, he wasn't a mean guy, he was just kind of aloof, but he was brilliant. I mean, he was a very brilliant guy, and so I'm learning more about him, more in terms of, I always knew that he, like my dad, we had the first television when I was growing up. We had the first television in town. He invented a radio before radials were even, you know, so he was a really brilliant guy, and I think he always assumed that he'd gotten a photography more for sort of the scientific, sort of tinkering aspect of it, but I'm now starting to realize that he had a real aesthetic. His aesthetic was really amazing, and the way he would pose people, he posed people in these, this is back in the 30s and 40s, 30s to the 50s, but he posed people in this very modernistic way. There were very modern images in the way that he would not use the lighting that was traditionally about, that was traditionally accustomed back in the day, you know, sort of that really sort of heavenly light coming down three quarter turn and all that. They were very straightforward, very confrontational, but they just have this amazing gaze, the people, and there's one, I wish I had it, there's one woman in particular that I've just fallen in love with. She just has this amazing gaze, and I've manipulated the image so that it doesn't resemble the original image. The original image is that big, so now where it is now, it's about four feet tall, probably three feet tall, three feet square, and it has been manipulated in a way where she's almost transparent. It's a little hard to describe, but anyway, so I'm thinking about all these different ideas and what that community was and how my father thought about how he photographed those things and how I can reinterpret those things and add my own voice into his work, so that's what I'm doing now, yeah. So you're thinking, your curiosity and the themes that you've given yourself were challenges that a magazine or newspaper would give you, and having heard that you're at Swarthmore, do you take these challenges to your students? Oh yeah, I love it. I mean, so what kind of... I throw as much stuff at them as possible. We had a class, actually we had just started a class last year, it's called Alternative Processes, which they wanted an alternative process class and I said, I can do that, but which is 19th century processes, Vandai can sound a type and things like that, which is good, but what I did was I had, I gave one of their assignments was to build a container that is 12 inches by 10 inches and three inches high, and then they had to populate that container with three, I think it was three photographs and two found objects and something else, but they had to make a composition within that box, and then once the composition was made, they had to photograph it, so the final thing was the photograph that they made from that box, and they pitched a fit about that for about five minutes, and this is a great thing about Swarthmore students, as much stuff as I can throw at them, they just take the challenge on and they came up with some amazing creations, I have to say. So, and that class is all about what is how things look photographed, not just what that thing is that you build, so it was about building and it was about photographing and it was about thinking about lighting and composition and foreground and background and all the things that you would find in traditional drawing class, really, line and form and texture and all those things, so they had to think about all that, and some of them would come up with these things and they just didn't look right and I'd have to send them back and they would jump into it, so that was one assignment, but yeah, and then we built a zine where they had to think about storytelling and how to, but storytelling visually, I think they can only use, I think it was, I think it gave them like 25 words, but they had to tell a story with images, so yeah, so everything that I, in my practice, I throw at them and I can't wait until semester starts because I have some other ideas I wanna throw at them, but yeah, yeah. At the White House in Strawberry Mansion, how did that community form, like was it an open place where people kind of were attracted into it, was it something passed from insiders to their friends and family, like how did people come and stay a long time or they come and go or what was the nature? You know, I'm not exactly sure exactly how it formed, but a little bit of the history about the White House, it was a stable used for vendors, horse vendors, you know, who sold fruit and vegetables and things off of carts, so and that's where most of these stables in town, what they were. I think at one time, I did a little research, I think there were like 80 stables all over the city and I think Bomsi, the guy who was the father of the little boy in the red, was the president of it and he, I guess it was his friends that sort of got together and pulled this thing together, you know, and then it's just like anything else and once you form it, they will come and then it just grew and grew and grew, so I think it was just sort of this organic thing that happened, I don't think it was anything that was, you know, planned, I think it just sort of happened, so. Hello, I have two questions. Clearly your giftedness is in photography. Did you, when you were interviewing the individuals that you met with, did you do any audio or videography? Yeah. So that was what you were saying when you said you have reels of video. Yeah, well actually I didn't do a lot of video because this was back in the 90, video was a little bit more difficult to do than it is now, but I do do a lot of audio. I have a lot of audio. Interviews. Interviews, yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, mostly on cassette tapes. Okay. At least there weren't eight tracks in it. And my second question is one of your comments you had mentioned, you had alluded to the lack of tension that is, you know, we have a passion about what we're doing. Do black cowboys have the idea of black cowboys themselves? Labeling themselves as black cowboys, like for those of us that aren't in that world, it's amazing and wow, I never knew. And we would say, oh, black cowboys. But in the absence of that tension, do they have a world where black cowboys? Oh yeah, yeah, I mean especially if you get down, you know, if you really sort of dig down in this and you get into, like, I keep bringing up this anti-wax saltgrass rodeo association, which was an all black rodeo association that, again, was sort of organically formed. I don't think it was something that was, you know, charted or anything. I think, you know, it was just, there's a lot of African Americans that have ranches down there and they farm and they, for entertainment, they have, they built backyard rodeo arenas and they're very conscious of the fact that they are black cowboys. But I don't think that actually necessarily defines who they are, they just do their thing. You know, I mean, you know, if the horse needs shooing, you gotta shoe it no matter what color you are, you know. I think what I found that existed in that community, now, you know, you get to Texas and places like that, there's always gonna be some layer of tension, I guess, between the races. But within sort of the cowboy community, and I may be making, painting this with a really broad stroke, I found less of that because, you know, you go to a rodeo and you're going there, you know, for the entertainment, but a lot of people in that community, you know, they buy their feed at the feed store together. You know, so I think there's a connectedness there that exists that maybe doesn't exist in some other communities and maybe it's all sort of channeled through that idea of horsemanship and, you know, the horse sort of being the connector. Yeah, so, yeah, I hope that answered your question. Great, I think we have time for one more question, so. So we live in West Philly and have had that experience of like going to the neighborhood park or walking our dog, you know, at 8 a.m. and all of a sudden there's a horse trotting down the street and we've only lived there for a couple of years, so definitely the first time you see it, it's a fascinating thing. And I'm wondering if you've ever witnessed or photographed in West Philly a similar sort of urban riding, and I know that was the name of the exhibit by Mohamed, but of kids on ATVs, you know, or like dirt bikes and the little kids are on their bikes and it seems to me like a similar, not similar, there are some similarities, just like the comradery and also I feel like they're riding things that you might expect to see on a farm or. Right. I don't know, it's very vibrant and just wondering if you've photographed that or thought about that. Yeah, well no, I haven't photographed because they're too fast. I mean, you know, that's why they never get, you know, cops can't even catch them. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's, there's probably some sort of similarity there with horses. I mean, I've seen these guys sort of have their own little rodeo arena, or rodeo thing. You know, if you go to West Philly, especially out near like Chaminie Stables out there, you know, there's those tennis courts, but there's some big vacant lots. And if you go out, you can see that. Yeah, near Belmont Plateau, but you can see the after math, the after words of, you know, they're having their little spin outs and things like that. When I was a kid, we would herd cattle with our motorcycles because it was easier, you know? I mean, you think that, you know, the cowboy and, you know, out riding the ranch with, you know, I mean, there was a guy named Don Venable who had like a 5,000 acre farm or ranch and he would, he would drive his cattle literally through the middle of town and they would have to drive him back. He would drive it to the grasslands in the north and this mountain and then drive it back across the river to his place. And when he got, when he got all, and he'd have, I don't know, maybe two or 300 cattle and he would hire just local kids to herd them all up and put them in the barn. And we, yeah, we could do it on a horse, but to do it on a horse, you gotta saddle the horse up, you gotta trot out there, you know? We could just jump on our motorcycles and do it in five minutes. So, you know, now I don't know if the kids in Philly are doing that. My guess is probably not, you know? No, but motorcycles played a big role in my existence as a kid. I got the scars to prove it. But, yeah, it was, yeah, so. But I have thought about that, you know, when I see them. And, you know, sometimes I think they shouldn't be doing that in the middle of the road on Broad Street, you know? Probably not cool. So. Well, thank you all so much for coming out tonight and please join me in thanking Professor Carter.