Stephen Collector is a longtime freelance photographer based in Boulder, Colorado. His book of black-and-white large-format portraits, called “Stock Detectives, Law of the Range: Portraits of Old Time Brand Inspectors,” was published in 1991. His portraits have been widely distributed throughout the West.
Wyoming Public Media’s Grady Kirkpatrick talked to him about the inspiration behind his photography and his new book of essays and photographs, “No Do-Overs in Paradise: Journeys Through Wild Places and Inner Landscapes,” which is out now.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Stephen Collector: Being a Colorado-based freelance photographer, I happen to hold a deep-seated reverence for the outdoors. So, it was inevitable that I cobbled together a way to combine my obsessions. I targeted the sporting press as an editorial objective, and this allowed me to camouflage my real inclination behind the appearance of earning a living.
Grady Kirkpatrick: In the preface, you describe a sacred vibration in the natural world. You also quote Daniel Tso, a Navajo Nation tribal member: "The undisturbed landscape holds much sacredness. It brings peace of mind, a settled heart and it gives good spiritual strength." There's additional Native perspective when you visit a Cheyenne medicine woman, right?
SC: That's true. I've long believed when I've been rambling around out in the backcountry, with or without a fly rod or a shotgun or whatever, that I'm not alone, and that there's a cultural history out West, and a whole lot of it has been lost over time. I'm a huge fan of Larry McMurtry, and McMurtry, I think, explores this a little bit.
Unlike the ancient cities of Europe, where you can see the Roman Colosseum and all of these sacred spaces in ancient Europe, we don't really have a lot of structures. There's not a lot on the ground to encounter, and I think you're left, ultimately, with relying somewhat on your imagination about the Indigenous people who lived and walked and practiced their magic here for 10,000 years or longer.
GK: You started your career as a photographer and eventually moved into writing, combining the two. What prompted that transition from photography into writing? Talk about the process.
SC: I was actually an English major in college, but to tell you the truth, I didn't have the guts to face a blank sheet of paper and try to somehow find my way forward, much less make a living at it.
But that English degree always rattled around when I collaborated with other writers in the sporting press, and I did quite a lot of this through the '80s and '90s and the early 2000s. I would find myself thinking, ‘Well, gosh, you know, I could probably write this.’ But the truth was it wasn't until I got older and my photography career started to wither that I had this wild idea that I was going to try to write stories.
To be honest with you, I was influenced in an odd kind of way by Hemingway. It was the Laramie River, in a way. My first story that I ever wrote was called “The Big Heart of Laramie,” and I cribbed that from Hemingway's famous story, “The Big Two-Hearted River.” When I started writing, I was the same age Ernest Hemingway was when he committed suicide, and I think, unconsciously, that had something to do with my fascination for his life.
And so I kind of started out like everybody else. I took a first step, and somehow, thanks to my younger son having brought home a copy of a sporting magazine called Southwest Fly Fisherman, I sent this story about the Laramie to the editor in Oregon, and lo and behold, he published it. Great. So that kind of set me on this path.
GK: A number of your stories are actually set in Wyoming, and you've got one that I think our listeners will appreciate in the Bighorns.
SC: You know, when I mention Hemingway, he had a great quote, and it says, "The only value we have as human beings are the risks we're willing to take." I think that that may be somewhat true.
I don't believe in a lot of his bravado stuff, but he certainly made his mark in the generation preceding mine. I think what's interesting sometimes is this idea of fathers and sons and family, and maybe fathers and sons in this sporting tradition.
I think it was in 2013, I decided to head up to the Middle Fork of the Powder River, and luckily I got my son, who was in his early 20s, to come with me. It was kind of a father and son buddy trip to the Bighorns, and it was the first time I'd ever really kind of gone into that range of mountains.
There's a story in this book called “Waiting Wet in the Hole,” and in the story I combine my interest in the history of Wyoming. It's [an] outlaw history. Specifically, in this story, it was about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who actually had what they call the Outlaw Cave down along the Middle Fork of the Powder. But what I discovered, in addition to feeling the spirit of the old outlaws in the Old West there, was there was an older spirit, and there's a cave there that's kind of all a painted cave. It's an outdoors overhang, and we stopped there. I met a local who kind of showed me this place, and it was covered with all kinds of rock art.
I've always been of a mind, as much as I like to fish, Grady, I'm interested in culture, and I'm interested in the history of place. And if I'm lucky, maybe I'm interested in taking a picture if the fishing's bad, you know? So I always have my fallback when I can't catch a thing. The Middle Fork of the Powder kind of delivered all of that. It delivered quite a bit of adventure, actually. Maybe more than I bargained for.
GK: There's another quote I wanted to mention from the book. It's actually toward the beginning. "Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after." That's from Henry David Thoreau.
SC: Terry McDonald, who used to be my editor at Sports Afield, actually included that in the introduction.
But I've used that line in some of my stories because Thoreau hit the nail on the head. I mean, the older I get, Grady, the more I'm aware that the joy of taking sport, as it were, there's several joys. First of all, we live in a country that has just an unbelievable amount of public land, and it's not just public land. It's amazing territory. We're talking about places like Yellowstone and the Tetons. We're talking about the Colorado Plateau. We're talking about the desert Southwest. I could go on forever. To me, that's my culture, and it's also, I guess you could say, it's my sanctuary.
I'll say this in closing to your question. Jim Harrison once wrote that, "The danger of civilization, of course, is that you'll piss away your life on nonsense."
