Law of the Range

More than a decade ago, Stephen Collector began photographing brand inspectors throughout the West. This simple curiosity gradually became an obsession, resulting in Law of the Range, runner-up as the best Art Book in the Rocky Mountain region. Collector’s goal was to achieve the portrait as landscape, and to know the landscape and its people. His black-and-white photographs document beautifully a part of the West missing and presumed dead. However, rustling is not entirely a thing of the past, and the profession of the range detective did not die out with Tom Horn. Collector’s fifty duotone portraits of inspectors, with short biographies and a dozen detail shots, are wonderfully enriched by Annick Smith’s evocative and informative introduction. This is indeed the portrait as landscape, and though the landscape may be irreparably altered by progress, the souls of these men endure.