In this latest collection of photographs, taken over the last forty-five years, Joan Myers turns her lens to the contemporary American West.
In so doing, she turns our conception of western landscapes and the life contained within them upside down, revealing the changes the region has undergone over the last half-century. Her perspective is at once elegiac and ironic, capturing the myth and reality of the West, its shaping and appropriation by Hollywood, popular culture, and the ever-present, but fracturing American dream. In one image, a larger-than-life statue of a cowboy stands on the same lot with a 1960s Cadillac Coupe de Ville. In another, a cardboard John Wayne-lookalike cowboy poses by a fence topped by saddles and a sign that says, “We accept all credit cards.”
