Moderator
Ron Tarver
Acclaimed photographer and Swarthmore College art professor Ron Tarver corrects the American cowboy narrative with The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2024). From ranches to city streets, Tarver’s photographs reveal the beauty, romance, and visual poetry of Black cowboys throughout the country.
In The Long Ride Home, Tarver illuminates the enduring heritage of Black cowboys through 110 photos made in the early '90s, at the start of this 30-year (ongoing) project. Pictured are cowboys and cowgirls of all ages, Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, urban cowboys, and retired cowhands. In addition, Art T. Burton, a distinguished historian, author, and expert on Black cowboys, provides a comprehensive essay on the icons who shaped America.
Tarver, a Pulitzer Prize-, Pew Fellowship-, and Guggenheim Fellowship-winning photographer is a natural pioneer of contemporary Black cowboy photography. Growing up in Fort Gibson, Okla., with Black cowboys as an ordinary part of his life, he rode horses, went to rodeos, spent summer days on his cousin's ranch, or working on local farms. His grandfather, Thomas Wilson, was a working cowboy in the 1940s. His father, Richard, was an avid photographer who documented the local Black community, teaching Tarver how to do the same.
When Tarver moved to Philadelphia in 1983, he was surprised by how uninformed people were about Black cowboys. The revelation spurred his dedication to photographing of Black cowboys, including on assignments for National Geographic and The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America is now available for pre-order from Amazon and GFT Publishing, and will be released on September 7, 2024. In celebration of The Long Ride Home’s release, 40 large format prints will travel the states in an exhibition sponsored by The Print Center in Philadelphia.
Artists
Richard Boutwell
Richard Boutwell, originally from Joshua Tree, California, is a photographer and print-maker based near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
His work is based around aspects of archaeology, family history and myth, and the influence of spirituality, technology, and social media on how we interact with the natural environment. Through it, he examines his personal connection to the greater cultural, industrial, and environmental history of the landscape—mostly involving issues of water rights and the impact of recreation in the desert landscapes of the Southwest. In addition to his traditional landscape photography, he is now combining his photographs with 3D scans of the environment, found objects, historical materials, and appropriated mapping and scientific data.
Boutwell began photographing in college in the year 2000 while studying music and pursuing a career as a jazz bassist. Shortly into his first darkroom course and being exposed to the beauty and creative possibilities of fine-art photographs, he dropped all his music classes and devoted himself to studying the history and craft of photography. Instead of pursuing a formal fine-arts degree, he relocated to Bucks County, Pennsylvania to enter an intensive long-term apprenticeship with the photographers Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee. He worked as their darkroom, studio, and field assistant from 2002 until 2008, and then became their full-time printer and ran the scanning and digital studio at their photography book publishing company, Lodima Press, until 2015.
In balance with his family life and fine-art practice, he teaches photography and fine-art printing. Boutwell also created specialized software that helped advance the craft of digital black-and-white and historic-process printing now used by photographers worldwide.
His photographs have been included in national and international group exhibitions and are in private and public collections. He has served as a guest lecturer on the history of landscape photography at mid-Atlantic colleges and universities.
Andrea Modica
Andrea Modica lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a photographer and teaches at Drexel University. A graduate of the Yale School of Art, she is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar.
Her books include Treadwell (Chronicle Books), Barbara (Nazraeli), Minor League (Smithsonian Press), Human Being (Nazraeli), Fountain (Stinehour Editions), L’Amico del Cuore (Nazraeli), As We Wait (L’Artiere Editions), January 1 (L’Artiere Editions), Lentini (Kris Graves Projects) Reveal (Yoffy Press), 2020 (TIS Books), Theatrum Equorum (TIS Books), Catholic Girl (L’Artiere Editions) and Italian Story (L’Artiere Editions).
Modica’s solo exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts. Her photographs are part of the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the ICP, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.
Vaune Trachtman
Vaune Trachtman is an artist specializing in photography and printmaking. Formerly a master printer of silver-gelatin prints and asphaltum-based photogravures, she began rethinking her materials after feeling that traditional methods had compromised her immune system. She now makes gravures with little more than light and water, often melding her own images with decades-old negatives, correspondence, and handwritten marks to create new photographic environments. Her images explore the evanescence of dreams and memory, creating what the Boston Globe described as “works that seem more like emanations than photographs.”
Her first book, NOW IS ALWAYS, published by Tusen Takk Press with a foreword by poet Major Jackson, was co-designed with David Skolkin and printed at Trifolio Press in Verona, Italy. It won Trifolio’s Special Prize and was shortlisted for the 2026 Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards.
In 2027, Trachtman will present solo exhibitions at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Texas Tech School of Art, and the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts.
Born in Philadelphia, Trachtman now lives and works in Vermont, in a former textile mill overlooking the Connecticut River.
Artist Talks at Moore College of Art & Design
Sponsored by Moore College of Art & Design and Aperturent
The Printed Landscape
In an era dominated by digital images, the photographic print and the photobook remain among photography's most enduring and expressive artistic forms. Join internationally acclaimed photographers Andrea Modica, Richard Boutwell, Vaune Trachtman and moderator Ron Tarver for an engaging discussion to examine the creative journey from image-making to the finished print and published book.
Working across platinum-palladium printing, historic photographic processes, documentary photography, and contemporary fine-art publishing, these artists demonstrate how craftsmanship, sequencing, materiality, and design shape the viewer's experience. From Modica's exquisitely crafted platinum-palladium prints and celebrated monographs, to Tarver's award-winning documentary project The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America, to Boutwell's innovative integration of traditional printmaking with twenty-first-century technologies, each artist offers a unique perspective on transforming photographs into lasting physical objects. They will explore the evolving role of fine printing, book publishing, collecting, and craftsmanship in contemporary photography, offering valuable insights for photographers, publishers, collectors, and anyone passionate about the future of the photographic image. [20/20]