In Anouk Masson Krantz's most expansive work to date, she travels tens of thousands of miles across the Americas, broadening her focus from the United States to both American continents. In her exquisite, large-scale photographs - all new for this book - Anouk captures sweeping landscapes and paints an intimate portrait of the enduring cross-boundary legacies of the North American cowboy, Central American vaquero, and South American gaucho. Her time spent at ranches and rodeos across The Americas has culminated in a magnificent book honouring a way of life many around the world dream of but rarely have experienced first-hand. Frontier builds upon Anouk's renowned body of work with her bestselling Wild Horses of Cumberland Island (2017); West: The American Cowboy (2019); American Cowboys (2021); and Ranchland (2022). Her stunning black and white, large-scale photographs capture a culture deeply rooted in principled, timeless values, sacrifice, strength, and self-reliance. From stunning panoramas to the intimate everyday lives of working cowboys and their families, Frontier is a must-have addition to her impressive body of work.
Bernie Taupin, Oscar winner, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and long-time song-writing collaborator with Elton John, has contributed an exceptional foreword.
"There's an honesty and integrity in these images that parlays all the elements of what it means to exist outside the boundaries of conformity and confinement. The rebel spirit, the rugged individualism, and the absolute unapologetic rhythm of history. This is stunning work--a true testament to the men and women who are the anvil on which America's backbone was forged." --Bernie Taupin
Gretel Ehrlich, best-selling and award-winning writer, poet, and essayist, has penned a fitting essay.
"So much has been made of the vanishing West, of "the last cowboy," of the museum-like vision of men and women who ride the range. They are often enshrined in movies and television series as if ranches had ceased to exist and cowboys and cowgirls had gone home to work in town. The opposite is true. In the long stretch of the Americas, from the tip of Argentina to the extreme north of Canada, and all through the United States, working cattle and sheep ranches continue on." --Gretel Ehrlich
Michael R. Grauer, known as 'Cowboy Mike', is the McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture and Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art at The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and one of the most knowledgeable cowboy historians in the world.
"Today, thousands of rodeos of all kinds occur across the Americas. Yet the foundation of rodeo remains grounded in the work of cowboys, vaqueros, gauchos, drovers, and cowhands from the sixteenth century onward, and of the human on horseback symbolizing freedom and liberty. Cowboys of the Americas, from Canada to Argentina, still do their jobs every day, without fail and without thinking twice." --Michael Grauer