Rodeo

Rodeo by Louise L. Serpa. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780893815851.

Action photographer Louise Serpa has spent the past thirty years photographing rodeos from inside the arena. The first woman granted this privileged position, Serpa takes us into the world of one of the few truly American sports, as riveting as it is symbolic of a rapidly changing American West. Novelist Larry McMurtry has devoted a distinguished career to revealing an American West that rejects what he calls the "romantic pastoral myth" that surrounds it. These two chronicles, one celebrating the West that she sought out, one rejecting the West that he was raised in, create a view of rodeo - in a passionate difference of opinion enlivened by enormous mutual appreciation and respect - that sizzles with a tension reminiscent of rodeo itself. Through Serpas extraordinary images and informative, anecdotal narrative, in tandem with McMurtrys provocative notes which challenge widely held beliefs about the mythic American West, Rodeo takes readers on an exhilarating ride.