Best western
‘ I’ve never ridden a horse,' says Jane Hilton, matter of factly. The framed portraits of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood stare out from the bookshelf. Jane was ten years old when she first straddled a horse on a wet week in Wales, as school trips often were. While her friend Lynn bolted away and others trotted triumphantly around, Jane’s horse, Jet, stood firm. ‘Give it a good hard kick,’ suggested an instructor. Jane obliged and Jet took off with speed. Jane’s body didn’t and involuntary back-flipped on to the ground leaving her severely winded. For this wanna be cowboy, it wasn’t a good equine introduction.
Jane’s fascination with cowboy culture began wedged between her family on their suburban home counties sofa, watching Westerns and . It culminated over three decades later. Looking out of the Farrow and Ball blue painted studio across a grotty, grey north London morning, Jane explains: ‘Whilst on a road trip in the United States, I was commissioned by in 2006 to photograph a 17-year-old cowboy called Jeremiah Karsten. He had travelled 4,000 miles on horseback from his native Alaska to Mexico which took him two and a half years to complete. Immediately after, I met him in Cortez, Colorado, where he had returned to spend time with a young girl he had fallen in love with. He was then nineteen. I took a photograph in Shiprock, New Mexico, an evocative image of Jeremiah riding along the roadside: barriers and fencing made it difficult for him to go cross country. Wild horses trail behind him which he used to sell to local ranches after he had broken them in. The photograph re-introduced me to a love of landscape photography and Jeremiah introduced me to some inspiring old cowboys whose homes were overflowing with Western artefacts. I then set off on my own four-year pilgrimage criss-crossing the cowboy states of Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, New Mexico and Wyoming to capture America’s 21st century cowboys. I’d always had a fascination with cowboy culture and the American dream, but this solidified it for me. I could have easily continued photographing this project forever.’ The photographs in ooze information: there are guns, hats, boots, skulls, crucifixes, spurs, living animals, stuffed animals, animal skins, horns and a surf board. And they’re chock-full of characters: there’s a Chuck, Ron, Bill, Ed, Bobby, Kim, Dave, Gary, Gave, Jake, Bud, Ted and Herman. The names are short and the portraits are sumptuous. The Wista 4x5 mahogany film camera with standard 90mm lens that took them, gorgeous.
