It’s difficult to overstate the significance of the figure of the cowboy in the self-conception of the United States. As photographer Ivan McClellan puts it, “The cowboy represents independence and grit and resilience, and all of the noblest traits of the American myth.” 

Yet it’s an iconography from which Black people have often been excluded, despite this being ahistorical: according to an article in the Smithsonian magazine, one in four ranch workers in the pre-Civil War Southwest was Black, and the term “cowboy” itself is rooted in the racist practice of addressing adult Black men as “boys” (their white counterparts were typically called “cowhands”). “To have Black people excluded from [the iconography of cowboys] says that Black folks aren’t resilient, aren’t gritty and aren’t independent,” says McClellan, who has been documenting Black rodeo culture across the US, mostly in Oklahoma and Texas, for over ten years, and whose new book, Eight Seconds: Legacy in Motion, is published by Damiani Books. By photographing Black subjects in the regalia of the cowboy – the hat, the chaps, the boots, the buckle – he hopes to “elevate that Black figure to the level of mythology [...] to take well-trod ground and just disrupt the hell out of it”.

McClellan had always been interested in all things Western. He would go to rodeos as a child, but it was really films that got him enamoured with the figure of the cowboy. His favourite film growing up was Tombstone, a 1994 Western starring Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, a character who is both dying of consumption and, as McClellan puts it, “the most badass cowboy you’ve ever seen in your life”. Yet, while there is a rich tradition of Black Westerns, Black people were largely absent from the films he saw growing up, and he rarely saw any Black people in his own life who resembled the characters he encountered on-screen.

“It wasn’t until I got invited to a Black rodeo in 2015 that I realised this was very much a part of my culture, and also very much part of how I grew up: there were people down the street from us who were raising cattle, but I didn’t acknowledge them as cowboys because they were Black,” he tells Dazed. “But at this Black rodeo, I saw thousands of Black folks, and they were wearing basketball shorts, Jordans and gold chains, and there were women riding horses with braids blowing behind them and acrylic nails clutching the reins; there was R&B, gospel and hip-hop music coming out of these horse trailers; there was smoked turkey legs, chicken and strawberry pop. It was the perfect marriage of all of the things I had seen in films growing up with all of the things that I knew about Black culture growing up.”

When McClellan first entered the world of Black rodeo, he didn’t know anyone. “I was wearing chinos, wingtips and a linen shirt – I couldn’t have fit in any less,” he says. “But people were as curious about me as I was about them, and I just started jumping in people’s trucks and driving places.” One memory that stands out is when he met a man named Sticky Hayes and his father, who took him on a hours-long road trip outside of Houston to sell a bull. “They were chewing tobacco and spitting it into a large McDonald’s cup and singing country music, which I had never heard Black people listen to before – that always felt kind of forbidden to me. They were just so joyful and in their element; they had a stranger in the back seat, and they couldn’t care less.”

Most of McClellan’s subjects have never been photographed before, and are “wildly uncomfortable”, he says, with the prospect of having a camera shoved in their face. When he arrives at an event, he’ll leave his camera in his car, get out and just start talking to people for however long it takes them to feel comfortable. After that, he tries to shoot quickly. “For me personally, I hate getting photographed – it’s the equivalent of torture – so I try to move really, really fast. I try to get the whole thing done in 15 minutes, and then we can go back to being friends,” he says. Creating that sense of ease and comfort with his subjects is, for him, his guiding principle as a photographer.

As well as the Western films he loved as a child, McClellan draws on an eclectic range of visual influences. His biggest source of inspiration, he says, is the photographer Carrie Mae Weems, who “depicted Black life in an almost uncomfortably intimate way – you see people in their dining rooms, you see people in their personal spaces interacting with their children in a way that feels almost invasive”. He also admires the writer, photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, who wrote The Learning Tree and directed Shaft, and the painter Kehinde Wiley: “The scale of [Whiley’s] work and his disruption of traditional elevated European aristocratic portrait by putting Black street figures in these positions has undoubtedly inspired my work. Every bit of media that I read or consume ends up in my photos in some ways,” he says, pointing to the symmetry of Wes Anderson’s cinematography or how, in Martin Scorsese’s films, what’s going on in the background is just as important as what’s going on in the foreground.

There’s a vivacity and colour to McClellan’s images which suggest a vibrant scene. But while this may be true of any given event, the culture of Black rodeo is actually “in rapid decline”, he says. “People are less reliant on local produce and local farming, and young people are less interested in jobs in agriculture, and as you see the population ageing pretty rapidly, with fewer and fewer of these cowboys existing every year,” he says, adding that he would be surprised if there are any Black cowboys left in 20 years. These problems exist across the board, and are affecting white cowboys too, but he suggests it’s “more accelerated” in Black communities because of a greater lack of support from the government, along with greater difficulties in accessing loans and financial subsidies. 

While changing economic conditions are driving the decline of rural life, McClellan suggests that a lack of interest or knowledge among younger people plays a role too. This is where he hopes his work might play a role in keeping Black rodeo alive. “We do large events in the middle of cities, like Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon. I think that’s the first time that a lot of city kids have ever seen a cow or a horse, or seen a real cowboy,” he says. “And so, exposing young people to this world, getting them to fall in love with it, is probably the most critical piece to making sure this culture can thrive for another generation.”

Eight Seconds: Legacy in Motion is published by Damiani and is available now.