Photographer Alex Bex unravels the mythmaking behind the Western cowboy

If there’s one thing that permeates the psyche of the current US government it’s the concept of ‘return’. The whole life-span of Trump’s political career has been defined by the tired, ever-recycled rallying cry of ‘Make American Great Again’, and every policy, speech and passing law seems desperate to revert back to some indistinct ‘golden era’, a time when the country was all-powerful, all-moneyed and all-‘American’. Part in parcel with these sweeping generalisations is the desire to peddle society backwards; for example, returning to a much more binary concept of gender, and the roles and characteristics that men and women ‘should’ manifest. Few images symbolise this return to an idealised masculinity better than the lauded American figure of the gun-toting, toothpick-chewing, stetson-wearing cowboy.

The construct of the cowboy sits at the centre of the photographer Alex Bex’s recent series, Memories of Dust. “In a time where modern questions of identity are increasingly being challenged, there is a pressing need to revisit traditional male representations,” says Alex. “To explore this, I chose to focus on the cowboy figure – an integral part of Texan culture and a powerful symbol of masculinity across the Western world.” But rather than simply seeking visual examples of the modern-day cowboy, Alex sought to interrogate the mythmaking and media glorification that has resulted in this long-revered symbol of manhood. Less of the roughish glamour of a Clint Eastwood flick, Memories of Dust instead more closely evokes the quiet tenderness of Chloe Zhao’s The Rider, a 2017 docu-fiction that follows rider Brady Jandreau as he grapples with the emotional and physical toll of a life-changing brain injury.

Born to a Texan mother and a French father, the photographer spent his formative years between Austin and Toulouse and growing up, Alex recalls being enamoured by Western films. “With their strong male leads, they had a big impact on me growing up. They shaped my early perception of what a ‘real’ man should be,” Alex says. “While those portrayals can be inspiring, I now see how they can also be misleading, especially for young boys who look up to these heroes.”

To really tune into modern cowboy culture, Alex left his Berlin base and returned to his childhood home and cowboy heartland: Texas. He travelled across the state meeting ranchers at rodeos and through prior connections, he lived and worked on various ranches for a few days or weeks, immersing himself in the local community. Visually, Alex was intent on “reproducing the visual language that has historically been used to construct and romanticize the cowboy myth”. Rather than trying to enhance his surroundings, Alex instead preferred to “imitate” them, using film, avoiding flash, working with natural light and seeking out visual atmospheres often recreated in Westerns, like sunsets and dark shadows.

Such dedication to theme has resulted in a collection of images that feel hard to place chronologically. They feel as though they could have been plucked from a dusty, pre-21st century photo album, that is, until you spot the small signals of modernity. The only group shot from the Memories of Dust is a high-school rodeo, a breathtaking mid-action shot that shows a group of teenagers (the next generation of riders) watching on as a peer rides a bucking horse into the ring. In this image, two things stand out to Alex: the teenagers’ stares and smartphones pointed at the rider. For Alex, the phone does more than simply signal era. In line with philosopher Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, the phone, in Alex’s eyes, becomes an “analogy for masculinity as performance, a comment on the power of myth-making through visual media”. Here, Alex posits the idea that rather than individuals willingly maintaining the hyper-masculine cowboy myth, it’s simply the image they’ve been taught to fabricate and present to the outside world.

For while visually Alex may try to visually reproduce visions of typical Western scenery with his shadows and sunsets, the actual moments he sought the capture were the opposite. Rather than falling into the same binary trap of the very thing he’s disavowing, Alex wanted to avoid simplifications of cowboy ‘bad’ – instead, his photos show “moments of intimacy or vulnerability among men that are rarely represented” which, for Alex, means they’re “more important to show and normalise”. One shot shows a young boy delicately inspecting a dormouse, for which he has made a bed on his lap. Another shows a man resting in his trailer, clearly overwhelmed by the heat, while one shows a young man helping a child apply bandages to an injury. What makes these scenes even more meaningful to Alex is that none of them are staged – each one is a genuine encounter.

In so accurately reproducing the visual world of the cowboy that we know so well and then imbuing it with sincerity, emotion and nuance, Alex peels away the hyper-masculine veneer that’s been lauded by Western films, American lore and now even social media. He proves that masculinity is far more complex and performative construct – even in the spaces we might deem it to be fixed.