Line of Trees, Albany County, Wyoming

Photograph by John Sanderson

The image which began this series from the driver’s seat of my car was of a dirt road stretching off into the high plains of Wyoming. It was a good picture. Any artist needs to feel good about a first picture in order to begin exploring an idea. A certain wonderment that begins it all. While working as a photographer in Carbon County, Wyoming, I became drawn to views of the American West from the driver’s seat of my van. I continued the theme and began discovering more scenes in the window frame: an image of a Sinclair Dinosaur was one, and another was of a little dog in front of his mobile home. Good pictures they were, but none I felt concluded the idea I was exploring through the window. Like any creative idea, I kept at it — sculpting away at time and space until I made the final image — the photograph you see here, Cattle Drive, was captured while chasing a trio of cowboys driving cattle one afternoon on the ranch in Wyoming. It was then I found the conclusive photograph.

I call images like these conclusive works because they counterpoint the naïve wonder of a first image with the further refined qualities of later, more (hopefully) articulate later image. Of course this is all entirely subjective and some of this is what feels right. It may be hard to elucidate, but it is sort of catechism like so: Does the image stands on its own internal merits, without other pictures in the sequence “to help it along”? Does it speak to a larger idea, or do the elements within the picture create an internal narrative within the frame? It is questions like these, mixed up with internal emotion and attachment, which help define the quality of a picture. In the end it is a combination of creative impulse, intent and personal history that led to its discovery, which bring forth a conclusive work.

Cattle Drive is a conclusive photograph because it contains a moment of repose seen in the horse and rider. The literal and figurative contrast of the car and cowboy enable the photograph to illustrate themes such as progress, history and the role of the cowboy in American mythology.

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