The first time Ron Tarver obtained on an airplane was at age 24 to interview for a employees photographer place at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Next 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 first Black photojournalist for the Muskogee Phoenix.
“It was just like, a complete head trip,” Tarver, now a pictures professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, recalled in an interview with Hyperallergic. “I never lived in a big city before … I thought, wait, there are more people out 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 images that comprise his new e-book popping out subsequent month. The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America (George F. Thompson Publishing) paperwork the lives of America’s working Black cowboys, with an accompanying exhibition in the works. Long earlier than pop-culture phenomena like Beyoncé’s 2024 Cowboy Carter album and Lil Nas X’s 2018 “Old Town Road” 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 was so depressed after that story,” he defined. “I said, ‘For the next story I want to do something that’s colorful, that has a little bit of joy to it.’”
In 1993, Tarver settled on photographing Black cowboys after seeing them “popping” out of Philadelphia’s parks. His editor at the Inquirer accepted his pitch, and after the photograph assortment ran in 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 National Geographic to proceed documenting Black cowboys, Tarver shot about 15,000 images throughout the nation, together with in Oakland and New York City, over the course of six months. Selections from these rolls make up The Long Ride Home.
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 girl named Betsy Bromwell. One {photograph} led to a different, after which one other.
“I was asking people down there if they knew somebody who really worked and lived the life of a quintessential cowboy,” Tarver mentioned.
In the 30 years since taking pictures this assortment of pictures, Tarver has tried to seek out numerous properties for his work. Some success got here in the type of museum exhibitions, together with the Studio Museum in Harlem’s group present Black Cowboy (2016–17).
The Long Ride Home will debut in revealed type practically 20 years after Tarver’s first pictures e-book, We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, from World War II to the War in Iraq (Amistad Press, 2005). And there’s a purpose it took so lengthy.
When he approached publishers about his newest e-book, editors questioned whether or not Black cowboys even existed. One editor, he mentioned, thought the topics of his images have been carrying cowboy costumes.
“And I’m like, ‘No, there are actual working cowboys out in America that make their living on ranches,’” Tarver recalled.
Tarver himself grew up engaged on farms, and his relations had ranches in Oklahoma. He additionally discovered about Black ranching tradition by his Texan father, who was additionally a photographer.
But it was by 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 most of the cowboys I do know,” Tarver defined in an e mail.
Despite earlier rejections, Tarver says he’s happy that the e-book is popping out now, partly crediting the affect of Beyoncé.
“If this book had come out when I wanted it to, it would have been long forgotten,” Tarver remarked.
Two exhibitions will accompany the e-book: one held this fall in Norman, Oklahoma, and the different in fall 2026 at the Print Center in Philadelphia.
If all goes properly together with his launch, Tarver desires to trace down the topics in The Long Ride Home who have been youngsters at 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 “visual poetry” of Black cowboy heritage in America.