True Grit

CAPTURING AMERICAN TRADITIONS IN TIMELESS BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGES.

- Barry Tanenbaum

IN 2006, MICHAEL CROUSER TOOK THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH in his mountain ranch project. Ten years later he took the last image to complete Mountain Ranch, the book that grew from the project. He calls the book “an exploration of the disappearing world of cattle ranching in the mountains of Colorado,” but it’s more than that: it’s a story of the ties and traditions of families, and a story of an America that was, struggling to still be.

His images, made with film cameras, chronicle the yearlong cycle of the ranchers’ lives, during which he avoided “evidence of modernity.” You’ll see no sunglasses, tennis shoes, or baseball hats; none of the things, he says, “that would yank the viewer out of the story.”

Crouser, who lived in New York at the time he started the project, headed to northwestern Colorado at the suggestion of a friend who lived near the ranchers. Introductions were made, and though at first they wondered what a New Yorker was doing there, he entered the lives of nine different ranching families. “Eventually I became quite good friends with them,” he says, “as I watched their families grow and documented what I think is an important part of American culture.”

SEASON TO SEASON 

He set no time limit on the project. The goal was to get it right.

“If I saw a certain aspect of their lives I didn’t feel I covered well enough, I’d think, Well, I’ll go back next year at this time. At one point I was way up on a rise, watching some of the ranchers on a cattle drive. It was beautiful, but when I got home I found my camera had malfunctioned. They weren’t going to do that drive again for another year, so I knew that in a year I’d be sitting on that mountain again, taking that picture again. And that’s what I did.”