Photographer Diana Jeffreys opens exhibit in Olney
Diana Jeffreys’s photography is a study of the overlapping textures of the Old and New Wests, and her exhibit at the Olney Community Library and Arts Center features everything from full-color big sky panoramas to the black-and-white portraits of saddles, spurs, and other accouterments of the cowboy life. She said she fell in love with photographing the cowboy way while taking photos of her husband roping cattle on his family ranch near Graham.
Mrs. Jeffreys had her first opening ever at OCLAC on Oct. 9 with those images, and others taken during photography trips to ranches in Montana and Arizona. The exhibit runs through mid-December and features board-mounted prints and a slide show of her work on a large monitor in the library special events room. The prints can be purchased by direct messaging Diana Jeffreys Photography via Facebook or Instagram.
The Enterprise attended the opening and talked with Mrs. Jeffreys about what inspires her.
Enterprise: These photographs are from different places in the West, I understand.
Diana Jeffreys: A lot of these are from a ranch out near Prescott, Arizona. It’s called the O RO Ranch. It’s part of the original Spanish land grant. It’s interesting because they still do things the old way; the guys … take a chuck wagon, they stay out in tents and the place is so rugged that you can’t get a truck to a lot of locations. So everything has to be done on horseback. So the guys go out, they take horses with them, and they go out and work each camp across that ranch to get everything done. It’s just really something to see … it’s almost like a lost art or people look at it and think, Oh, it’s like a movie. It is, but, but it’s real life.
Q: So you were horseback riding also? A: Most of the time, we’re usually in trucks and we’ll go to certain locations that we can get to when we know where the cowboys are gonna be working. Most of the time, we’re in trucks so that we can get ahead of them to photograph them coming in or get behind them that way. We’re able to move around quicker to get where we need to be.
Q: So what is the story with this cowboy with the cell phone?
A: I don’t really have anything titled but this one, and I call it phone tree. When I first went out to this ranch, my friend Holly says, we’re going to go to the phone tree to make a few phone calls. She said, I’ll explain it to you when you get here. Well, there’s no cell phone service anywhere on this ranch .. so we’re out working and she said, Okay, here we are at the phone tree if anybody needs to make a phone call. I thought, Oh, okay. This is the phone tree. When people are up working there, they can ride up to the phone tree and take care of business. This is the ranch manager there making a business call at the phone tree.