The Philly photographer who spent decades photographing the beauty and majesty of Black cowboys

More than 30 years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Ron Tarver began photographing Black cowboys, rodeo queens, and ranchers across the southern plains of east Texas, the low hills of Oklahoma, and the urban pathways of Philadelphia.

On assignment for National Geographic and The Philadelphia Inquirer, Tarver captured generations of cowboys and cowgirls working in their stables, strutting in small-town parades, or cooking breakfast inside their ranch-style homes. After failed attempts to thread the detailed portraits and textured landscapes into a book project, Tarver put away nearly 20,000 pictures in a storage container.

In the years since, Tarver published a book about the experiences of African American war veterans and became an associate art professor at Swarthmore College after a 30-plus-year career in photojournalism.

His new book, The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America, was released on Saturday. A week later, Tarver will be doing a book signing, sponsored by the Print Center, at the 20 / 20 Photo Festival Photo Book Fair at Cherry Street Pier on Sept. 7. The book’s photos will also be on display at InLiquid Gallery as part of their “Brotherly Lens: A Portrait of Philadelphia” exhibition, which is part of the 20 / 20 festival.

“This is one of those projects that wouldn’t leave me alone for the longest time,” said Tarver. “It’s always been on my mind because it’s such an important project to get out into the public.”

Black cowboy culture’s recent renaissance in pop culture may have started with the 2020 North Philadelphia-set western Concrete Cowboy, starring Idris Elba. Musicians from Lil Nas X to Beyoncé have also straddled horses and donned bolo ties for songs honoring the Old West.

For Tarver, the timing is perfect. “It’s out in the zeitgeist now,” he said. His book’s 110 images showcase the deep roots of the country’s Black cowboys and cowgirls.

Tarver’s The Long Ride Home isn’t the act of an outsider looking into Black cowboy culture. He lived it.

Tarver grew up in Fort Gibson, Okla., where he rode horses bareback, attended rodeo shows, and spent his summers working on local farms and his cousin’s ranch.

His grandfather, Thomas Wilson, was a working cowboy in the 1940s. His father, Richard, introduced Tarver to the world of documentary-style photography.

It wasn’t until Tarver, now an Elkins Park resident, moved to Philadelphia in 1983 that he realized how unacquainted people were with the Black West.

“The bottom line was people didn’t think there was such a thing as a Black cowboy. I got all kind of strange feedback [on the book] from people literally saying, ‘I don’t think there’s an audience for this. I don’t think there’s any kind of thing or entity as a Black cowboy.’ So, that’s why I put this thing in a box and just said, ‘Forget about it.’”

According to Smithsonian Magazine, one out of every four cowboys who were “trailblazing, sharpshooting, and horseback riding” on the American frontier were Black. And with the release of The Long Ride Home, Tarver paints a vivid picture of the culture’s history and grandeur.

Liz Spungen, executive director of the Print Center, said Tarver faced many roadblocks to the book’s release. But she’s thrilled to see the decades-long project come to life, and to have the capacity 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 more eager, I hope, to understand the larger contributions of Black Americans in the West. We are more attuned to hearing these stories now, so I’m hoping it will receive a fabulous audience.”

With renewed interest in his Black Western project, Tarver was tasked with cutting down his 20,000-image collection to a book-size number. He focused on the years between 1992 and 1996, and zeroed in on photos of everything from the rodeo shows to the after-hour hangs.

“I wanted to show that this isn’t a fad,” Tarver said. “I wanted to show the broad spectrum of Black Western lifestyle, and its vibrance even as far back as then.”

Tarver narrowed it down to 250 photos, and then tapped longtime friend and former NatGeo magazine photo editor Elizabeth Krist to pare the project down even further.

In the editing process, Krist was impressed by the stark contrast between Tarver’s detail-rich portraits and “visceral action shots.”

A founding member of the Visual Thinking Collective, Krist is hopeful that the book opens 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 and think, ‘OK, that was the 1800 or 1900s.’ This is something that is still going on. I hope people really understand it on a deep level when they see his work.”

Once the final lineup of photos was selected, New Mexico-based designer David Skolkin stepped in. He was in awe of Tarver’s ability to meld his journalistic practices with his creative nuance.

The two men connected on long phone calls and Zoom meetings for months to finalize the layout and photo sequencing for The Long Ride Home. “It was like figuring out a puzzle,” Tarver said.

“The images felt very real to me. I could feel the people, sense their emotions, and could even sense how things smelled in the environment of the photographs. They had a texture that was very accessible to me,” Skolkin said of the final book.

With the book’s release, Tarver is reminded of the people he connected with throughout his career. Many of the children he photographed in the early 1990s have carried on their families’ legacy of farming and cowboy culture.

Tarver hopes to develop another book dedicated to the families he first photographed. He also wants his images to be placed in national museums and global showcases to continue sharing the story of the Black West so people can celebrate its largely undocumented glory.

“We all built this country,” Tarver said, “and to remind people that we were in this culture and have been for a long time is important. I hope this book carries out that idea, as well as the beauty and majesty of it.”