Wouter Deruytter: Cowboy Code

Belgian photographer Wouter Deruytter is well-known for his images of people in the masks and costumes of their identities-from the time-traveling duo McDermott & McGough, to drag queens, to circus performers, and on and on. Now Deruytter has turned his attention to the American West-for the past three summers he has been photographing cowboys and small town rodeos in Montana. The rodeo cowboy is an omnipresent image in American culture, a modern day folk hero and the subject of plays, movies, television, novels, and all the other arts. But in these photographs from small, non-commercial rodeos Deruytter brings to light a more homemade image than what we have become accustomed to. Deruytter's cowboys are not one-dimensional anachronisms: they tell a great mythic tale, but they also suggest several historical parallels and force us to remember vanishing things we like to think of as permanent American values. They carefully document the small town rodeo, and ultimately they exude a sensuality and youthful elegance these cowboys may not be aware of. These are eloquent and sensual images that bring to light another side of the cowboy myth in America.

Americans have constructed a mythology about cowboys and cowboy culture. These three books take a look at 21st-century cowboy life and initially leave the reader thinking, What is all the fuss about? Capp is grouped here because she points her camera at many sites and people in the West; cowboy culture is an inevitable accident in her lens resulting from her travels on the edges of cowboy territory. Her photographs look and feel as if we have seen them before, in small college galleries where young unknowns have neatly framed their random, tilted images in black and white. Also shooting in black and white, Williams looks at cowboy hands. His view of hard and dangerous work actually the demonstration of a narrow set of skills and risks in the rodeo translates into nearly kinetic visuals in his photographs. In his rush to show toughness, however, Williams has not taken the care to produce good photography. So it falls to Deruytter, roaming around Montana with a camera, some patience, and an artist's appreciation for subtlety, to compose pictures of real cowboy life. Beat-up spurs, well-worn boots, weathered skin, big animals, and battered fence posts are all full of timeless wear and tear. This and the fear in young cowboy faces and the resignation in old cowboy hearts make his photographs seem tough, honest, and durable. There is little point or quality in Williams's and Capp's books, but Deruytter has a compressed visual tale to tell, and he is ably assisted by Wood's rambling essay about cowboys and the West. David Bryant, New Canaan Lib., CT
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.