More than 30 years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Ron Tarver began photographing black cowboys, rodeo queens and ranchers on the southern plains of East Texas, the low hills of Oklahoma and the city streets of Philadelphia.
Commissioned by National Geographic and The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tarver photographed generations of cowboys and cowgirls working in their stables, strutting in small-town parades, or preparing breakfast in their ranch houses. After failed attempts to incorporate the detailed portraits and textured landscapes into a book project, Tarver stashed nearly 20,000 images in a storage container.
In the years that followed, Tarver published a book about the experiences of African-American war veterans and, after a career in photojournalism spanning more than 30 years, became an adjunct professor of art at Swarthmore College.
His new book The long way home: Black cowboys in America finally published on September 7. On the same day, some of the The book’s images will be exhibited during the 20/20 Photo Festival at Cherry St. Pier.
“This is one of those projects that has stuck with me for a long time,” Tarver said. “I’ve always thought about it because it’s so important to get this project out there.”
The recent renaissance of black cowboy culture in pop culture may have begun with the 2020 western set in North Philadelphia. Concrete Cowboy with Idris Elba. Meanwhile, musicians from Lil Nas X to Beyoncé have also mounted horses and put on bolo ties to sing songs that honor the Wild West.
For Tarver, the timing is perfect. “It’s totally in the zeitgeist now,” he said. The 110 images in his book show the deep roots of the country’s black cowboys and cowgirls.
Tarvers The long journey is not just the action of an outsider photographer who explores the culture of black cowboys. He lived it.
Tarver grew up in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, where he rode bareback, attended rodeo shows and spent his summers working on local farms and his cousin’s ranch.
His grandfather, Thomas Wilson, was a cowboy in the 1940s. His father, Richard, introduced Tarver to the world of documentary photography.
It was only when he, now a resident of Elkins Park, moved to Philadelphia in 1983 that Tarver realized how little the people there were familiar with the black West.
“Ultimately, people didn’t believe there was such a thing as a black cowboy. I got all kinds of weird feedback (about the book) from people who literally said, ‘I don’t think there’s an audience for this. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a black cowboy.’ So I put the thing in a drawer and just said, ‘Forget it.'”
According to Smithsonian Magazine, one in four cowboys who “pioneered, sharp-shooted, and rode” on the American frontier were black. And with the publication of The long journey, Tarver wants to paint a vivid picture of the history and greatness of this culture.
Liz Spungen, executive director of the Print Center, said Tarver overcame many obstacles in publishing the book, but she is excited to see the decades-long project come to life and to have the opportunity to showcase his work in a planned exhibition in fall 2026.
“I think there’s probably a more receptive audience for it now… people are now, I hope, more eager to understand the larger contributions of black Americans in the West. We’re more attuned to hearing those stories now, so I hope it will find a great audience.”
When interest in his Black Western project revived, Tarver was tasked with paring down his 20,000-image collection to book size, focusing on the years between 1992 and 1996, concentrating on photos of everything from the rodeo shows to the after-hours gatherings.
“I wanted to show that this is not a fad,” Tarver said. “I wanted to show the broad spectrum of the Afro-Western lifestyle and its vibrancy, which was already evident back then.”
Tarver narrowed the selection down to 250 photos and then commissioned his longtime friend and former NatGeo magazine photo editor Elizabeth Krist to trim the project even further.
During the editing process, Krist was struck by the stark contrast between Tarver’s detailed portraits and the “haunting action shots.”
Krist, a founding member of the Visual Thinking Collective, hopes the book will open people’s eyes to the lived culture of black cowboys, both then and now. “It’s an ongoing culture. It’s not something you look back on and think, ‘OK, that was in the 19th or 20th century. This is something that’s still going on.’ I hope that when people see his work, they really understand it on a deep level.”
Once the final selection of photos was made, New Mexico-based designer David Skolkin took on the task, impressed by Tarver’s ability to combine his journalistic practices with his creative nuance.
The two men spent months having long phone conversations and Zoom meetings to finalize the layout and photo sequences for The long journey. “It was like solving a puzzle,” Tarver said.
“The images seemed very real to me. I could feel the people, sense their emotions and even sense how the things smelled around the photos. They had a texture that was very accessible to me,” Skolkin said of the finished book.
As Tarver prepares for the book’s release, he reflects on the people he’s come into contact with throughout his career. Many of the children he photographed in the early 1990s are carrying on their family’s legacy of farming and cowboy culture.
He hopes to publish another book dedicated to the families he first photographed, and he wants his images to be shown in national museums and exhibits around the world so the story of the Black West can continue to be told and people can celebrate its largely undocumented glory.
“We all built this country,” Tarver said, “and it’s important to remind people that we were part of this culture and have been for a long time. I hope this book conveys that idea and its beauty and majesty.”