Open Range

"I grew up with a particular kind of photobook—oversized, black-and-white, smelling faintly of paper and ink. These books got a lot of mileage in my home. The pages were wrinkled, and maybe even torn. On them were horses in clouds of dust, bucking broncos in mid-flight, men with big mustaches and even bigger hats. Those picture books shaped how I came to imagine the West. Open Range belongs to that lineage and earns its place in it."—PB-S John Langmore spent six years and rode through fourteen of the largest ranches in the American West to make this beautiful, oversized book. Open Range offers a rare and unsentimental witnessing of a way of life many imagine and few have lived. Langmore began cowboying in 1975 at the age of twelve, the same year his father, Bank Langmore, published the seminal photobook The Cowboy. He spent twelve summers in the saddle before leaving for a legal career, and only returned to the work three decades later, this time with a camera. From 2012 to 2018 he traveled the big outfits of Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, Montana, and Wyoming, photographing on black-and-white film during seasonal works—branding, gathers, cutting colts. The result is 90 tritone plates and thirty pages of his own plainspoken recollections, a body of work made possible by the fact that he came to it first as a colleague and only later as a photographer. Photographs and text by John Langmore. Published in 2018 by Twin Palms Publishers. 144 pages, hardcover with dust jacket, illustrated with 90 tritone plates.