IL Buckaroo TJ Symonds

IL Buckaroo T.J. Symonds with Camp Baked Bread - Nevada, 1979

I made this portrait of 17-year-old buckaroo T.J. Symonds just a few minutes after first meeting him in the IL ranch cow camp in northeastern Nevada in 1979. “Buckaroo” is what they call cowboys in Nevada, Oregon, and Idaho. It’s a bastardization of the Spanish word “vaquero.” I was working on making pictures for a book on the American west and the cowboy and I’d heard about this outfit that still ran a cook and bedroll wagon for a branding cow crew that camped out on the land for weeks at time. I’d showed up in my van late the night before and I photographed T.J. early in the morning just as the rest of the crew was leaving camp to start a roundup. T.J. had felt ill the day before and stayed in camp that morning. I stayed in camp and rode with this outfit for a week or so. I don’t believe I ever knew what T.J.’s initials stood for. My book, “Vanishing Breed—Photographs of the Cowboy and the West,” with a forward by novelist Thomas McGuane, was published in 1982 by Little Brown/New York Graphic Society. In their review the Associated Press said: “This is a classic.”

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