Eclectic Horseman 2020
Eclectic Horseman Magazine | January/February 2020 | Issue No. 111
Thank you Emily and Eclectic Horseman for this great feature story!!!! It was written about four women who have been cover photographers for the magazine. The series was written by Tom Moates. (This is a proof and doesn't include cutlines.)
"I grew up on a cattle ranch and I've ridden horses my entire life until seven or eight years ago," says Mary Williams Hyde. "I have been taking photos professionally since 1972 when I worked for a newspaper and that was part of my job. And I got interested in the buckaroo photography starting in 1990 when I did public relations pieces for Spanish Springs Ranch, a major city slicker type guest ranch out in the desert of Northeast California. I got serious about taking photos in 2005 and started traveling, setting a goal of documenting those who keep the old buckaroo/Californio/vaquero traditions—and get as many of them as I could in my life."
Mary grew up on a ranch near Bly, Oregon. Her family has been in the ranching business since 1911 in Klamath County, Oregon.
"So the ranch I grew up on had buckaroos working for us," she says. "And it was just a mix of people that came and left, a crew of all the different horsemanship and stockmanship traditions. I came to really love buckaroo traditions before I even took photos. One of my goals was to try to keep the traditions alive and support them at the purest level as I could because there's been a lot of influence by other traditions, like barrel racing and team roping and Texas cowboy style/pro-rodeo style traditions that are really eating away at those who try to keep the old buckaroo traditions."
"And I really like the horsemanship traditions of starting a horse when they're older, first in a hackamore, then taking them into the two-rein and the spade bit, and then, after several years, enjoying a 'straight up' bridle horse. I just really admired what I saw and the people out on these ranches who really knew how to do it. They weren't going to clinics—that's just what they did. They knew how to handle and make good bridle horses and good stock horses. For the most part they were the real deal and you could just feel it when you photographed them."
Mary says her real passion is for her buckaroo subjects and not photography itself. The camera simply is a tool she uses to convey a message.
"I learned to be a good photographer," she explains. "but it's not because I love photography more than the story itself. I take photos to tell stories."
It took many years of steady work photographing and sharing the photos she took with the buckaroos for Mary to gain the trust of the people in that world.
"I would come back home and I would print out the best of what I had taken at an event and I would go back again or go to another place because pretty much throughout the region everybody went to all of the events," Mary says. "It's kind of a small, close group. And I would put these photos in plastic sleeves and put them in the back of my pickup and while I was standing at the fence taking photos people would go through my photos."
"I also went to ranch rodeos. In those days, I would always call and ask if I could come and was allowed to come to pretty much every event I wanted to photograph. It is not so easy now, as event photography has gotten very competitive. I had my prints available to see either online or in person, giving me opportunities to talk to people and get to know them, because when I started I didn't know anybody—not a single person—now I know a lot of people. And I particularly was interested in anybody who kept the old traditions that I remembered as a kid, the buckaroos that worked for us and things that I saw at the ranch and at the local rodeo which was on the local Indian reservation. It was wild and wooly and I don't find that at pro-rodeos at all, but I found it out in eastern Oregon and northern Nevada—oh my goodness."
To date, Mary has been to more than 300 ranch rodeos and ranches taking photographs and her photography has been featured on the cover of many national magazines. Last year Western Horseman featured her work in a large spread, and the year before Range magazine did the same.
"I've taken between a million and a half and two million photos on this journey," Mary says. "I have already edited the numbers down to more than half. In the last years of my life I will try to print the ones that are the very best as digital storage devices might not be suited for long term archiving of photos."
To view some of Mary's photography and learn more about her work you can check out these websites and her Facebook page:
