Revealing Character

Using the cumbersome nineteenth century tintype method, National Geographic photographer Kendrick made a series of portraits of some of the men andwomen who work as cowboys on Texas ranches today. Unlike Richard Avedon's In the American West, this lavish book has no interest in the cultural contradictions inherent in the lives of those who deliberately try to evoke long-vanished and economically marginal ways of life-Kendrick is content to record the cowboys' images as lovingly as they would have themselves. In such an aesthetic, character is not revealed, but worn like chaps or an elaborately groomed mustache. The result is a book whose preening collective narcissism tips it over into the realm of camp. Perhaps sensing this, in his introduction Kendrick writes defensively, ""The point of this project has not been to romanticize the cowboy and transport him back to the 19th century, but to document those who carry on the traditions, values and lifestyles that many today would find isolating, lonely or simply too hard."" This sheer nonsense compounds the book's fervid glorification of its already self-romanticizing subjects with the implication that they are somehow better than those people who work in office buildings. And in a world where the figure of the Texas ""cowboy"" has become symbolic for very different reasons, this book-financed by a bank and conceived by an advertising agency-has a political subtext that's hard to ignore