This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Photographer Jeremiah Murphy documents the motion and action happening in South Dakota's rodeo arenas.
He's known for his striking photos of horses, riders, dust and grit. He's known across the state and now around the nation.
The New Yorker's Photo Booth featured his photos and his story. Find it here.
He stops by SDPB's studio to discuss his photography and how he finds the perfect shot.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Lori Walsh:
And a lot of people across the nation who don't know you as well as South Dakotans know you, are about to know at least something about you, which is your work as a photographer, because The New Yorker has picked up your photographs. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with The New Yorker and that process.
Jeremiah Murphy:
My relationship with The New Yorker is brand new and just an absolute treat. And how we got there was really fun. Our oldest son, Hunter, he develops brands. He lives in Salt Lake. And Hunter has a friend, a photographer from Montana, Will Warasila, and Hunter was showing some of my photographs to his friend Will. Will said, "Hey, I know a photo editor at the New Yorker and I think she'd really get a kick out of these."
Hunter sent those on to my new friend, Stacey Pittman in New York. She was very enthused about them and a real advocate for this project. And then Stacey brought in a writer, Casey Cep, who is just terrific. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker.
She's published a really interesting book called "Furious Hours," which is about Harper Lee. In any event, they put Casey together with me. We had about a two-hour phone call and the result is what you see there.
But it all started with my son, so that's a lot of fun.
Lori Walsh:
And before we get into this, The New Yorker is famous for having fact-checkers. Were you fact-checked on all your memories of your life in photography or not?
Jeremiah Murphy:
Boy was I. Yeah, I kind of look forward to that. In the one sense, I go way back with The New Yorker. My grandmother gave me a subscription when I was 12, and I've had a subscription ever since.
So I'm familiar with the fact-checkers, and in fact, this is their 100th anniversary. And they did a really interesting article on them the other day. But I mentioned this to your friend Kevin Woster, and Kevin contributed a couple of quotes to an article on Thune that The New Yorker did recently. And I think he said he got two or three calls from them just over a few sentences.
And honestly, my grandfather had a saying, "Never spoil a good story for want of a few facts," and I might be in that mold. And I thought, how are they going to fact-check just my random gibberish?
As it turned out, it was really interesting and it was more than a fact-check call. There were context questions, and does this fit and does that fit? But every time she would say to me, and it would always start like this, she'd say, "Now, Casey quoted you as saying..." And she'd start speaking. And I always felt like I was in the witness chair. "Did you really say this?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dumb as it sounds, that's what I said."
Lori Walsh:
Was anything revealed during the fact-checking process that you think, "Oh yeah, I'm really glad that that didn't make it into print, because people in South Dakota would've laughed at that"? Because they would've been like, "No, that's not. They got that wrong."
Jeremiah Murphy:
Well, yes, there were several of those sorts of things.
Lori Walsh:
That's why they check.
Jeremiah Murphy:
Yeah. They rounded the corners and made the joints smooth and made things make sense. Yeah, obviously what you don't want is somebody to look at that, who does know rodeo and does know ranching and all that, and go, "Well, they don't know what they're talking about." So yeah, there were some little things and it all came into line very nicely.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Well, I want to talk more about Casey's writing here in a minute, but first, let's talk about these images, because I know your work to a certain extent. I follow you on Facebook. I've seen things before.
But seeing them all in context like this, it's really quite astonishing, the body of work. And this is only a small excerpt of it. What was it like selecting and curating the images that might end up in this piece, which is called the "Guts and Glory of Indian Rodeo" in The New Yorker published on Oct. 6 online?
Jeremiah Murphy:
It is. That choosing process, that editing process is, it's a big part of it and it's challenging, because you do, you want to get it right. And there's a truism in writing and editing your writing, and I think they say, "Kill your babies."
And some of that applies here where it's just, this photo or that photo that was just one of my favorites, it's like, "I don't know if this works." I worked with Hunter, my son, on that, who's a graphic designer, and he was a great help.
You almost need a second pair of eyes to keep you honest and/or bring in some other information, and we wound up with what we thought was a really good collection. And of what we submitted and what they asked for, virtually everything wound up in the piece. So we guessed well, I think.
Lori Walsh:
This first image, it really takes a few hundred words to explain what a wild horse race is. This is a picture that you say you got injured in. Tell us a little story, for radio listeners, about this first image where there's a lot happening in here. I think she says, "Hats are flying, boots are dug in." She has wonderful description of it. Oh, here it is. "A black and white Bruegel." Sorry, what's a Bruegel? I don't know what that is.
Jeremiah Murphy:
Bruegel is, among the various over-the-top compliments, that's one. He was the 16th Century Flemish painter.
Lori Walsh:
Oh. Oh, okay.
Jeremiah Murphy:
Yeah. It's The New Yorker, right?
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. "This image has everything, horse rearing, men cowering, hats flying, boots dragging, and hooves trampling. Somehow it captures even the senses it technically can't, from the sound of clanging chutes and slamming gates, to the taste of blood and dirt and the smell of cigarette smoke and cow... " can't say that word on the radio. Wow, Casey, nice writing.
But that's a good description of the picture. You tell me a little bit about making this picture.
Jeremiah Murphy:
It's a wonderful and a generous description of that picture, and she gets a lot of the job done. It's funny, I've wanted to put something together in photography for a while, and one of the things, frankly, I would sort of joke about this but I was serious, is I'd say, "I want to go on Lori Walsh's show and talk about pictures." Because it's impossible. I want to go on radio and talk about pictures.
Lori Walsh:
We needed Casey to give us some of the words. Yeah.
Jeremiah Murphy:
Yes.
Lori Walsh:
And here we are.
Jeremiah Murphy:
Absolutely. So that's part of the fun here.
But this picture, I think it's a great representation of a wild horse race because it's like everything is going on all at once. You see two people on the left of the frame. And it might not be evident, but the person closest to the horse on the rope is a woman. That's a team of two men and a women. Their teammate is on his back and sort of reaching up, and he's desperate. He is under the back hooves, or nearly under the back hooves of two different horses. His hat has flown off about 20 or 30 feet distant and about 15 or 20 feet high. There's dust everywhere.
And what I really love about it is the light. The light in Rosebud is really something, and beyond just sort of knowing it's special, it's hard to say beyond that.
But there were thunderheads overhead, sort of broken up. The light reflects off the bottom of some of those, and you get a particular quality in this photo that, the way the dust and everything comes up, it's just everything came together really nicely.
Among the photos you've seen, you've never seen that one, because it almost scared me it was so good. And I feared I wouldn't edit it well and I took a lot of time at that. So it's just kind of like there's a riot going on with horses and people and ropes and all of that.
Now, you had mentioned the injury, and the injury had happened the subsequent year. This photo was taken in 2018. But that scene, if you look at that photo, one thing that happens in wild horse races is that horses will get away pretty quick. The horses have a huge advantage.
And invariably, if there are, say, five or six teams, one of those horses will get away quick. I have a rule. It's dangerous in there, and so my rule is pretty straightforward. I'll be out at the edge of things in the arena, but when the first horse breaks loose, I head for the fence and get up the fence and out of the way.
I was down in Rosebud one day in 2019 and there was a wild horse race, and it was just spectacular. The action was so good, like a little kid, I broke my rule. And now I'm making my way around the arena and I'm all the way to the other end. I can recall distinctly the shot I was trying to get, and these two guys were wrestling with this horse. It was backlit. I knew the horse was going to rear, you can just kind of tell, and there was dust everywhere. I knew what was going to come together and I was waiting to get it.
The next thing I remember is a bullfighter had me by the belt and he's dragging me to the edge, to the fence. He's like, "Murphy, you have to get the beep up. We got to get out of here."
I'm just stunned. I'd been run over.
He gets me to the fence. And that was the last event of the day. It typically is. So I'm making my way along the fence toward my car. Around rodeos it's a six or seven-foot high fence, and I am really in some pain. I get to the end of that fence and I've got 100 yards or so to get to my car and up a gentle hill, and I'm trying to get going.
Two women come by and they said, "Are you all right?" I started to say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm..." And I just said, "No, I'm not all right." "Can we help you?" And I said, "Yeah, I could use some help."
It was two women, Bobbi Vanden Hoek and Lisa Colombe, and they were on either side of me and I had my arms over their shoulders. They got me to my car and they said, "Are you sure you're all right?"
And once I was sitting down, I was fine. And they said a little prayer over me, which was really the nicest thing, among a number of nice things they did for me that day. And I got in my car and drove to Rapid.
I got to the ER. I was comfortable as long as I was sitting. I got to the ER in Rapid. I had to call the ER and say, "Hi. I'm in the red Honda out here in the parking lot." They sent a big burly nurse out and he was great, and he grabs me. Several people grabbed me by the belt that day. He grabbed me by the belt and pulled me out of the car and into a wheelchair, and they took me into the hospital.
They said, "Well, you cracked your pelvis. There's nothing you can do, but go easy."
And they really did, they gave me a pair of crutches and a jar of pain pills, and I had to just take it easy for a few weeks.
I had a guy, Cole Waters, told me once, he's a stock contractor down in Pine Ridge, he said, "You'll never be a real rodeo photographer, Murphy, until you get schmucked down." Well, I got schmucked down.
Lori Walsh:
You got schmucked down. Yeah.
Jeremiah Murphy:
That is that big beautiful picture, and that's what happened a year subsequent.
Lori Walsh:
That's a great story. All right, so the picture is from 2018, the injury is 2019. But I want to go back to something you said about the 2018 picture, which is that you were afraid you couldn't edit it well?
Jeremiah Murphy:
Mm-hmm.
Lori Walsh:
What's going on there?
Jeremiah Murphy:
Well, I don't edit much in terms of, I don't really change anything. And Casey mentioned in the piece, the only thing I'll take out of a photo are dust spots that are actually on my filter. They're not part of the picture, they get on my filter.
And I think she also got the point in there that you want to keep outhouses out of the backgrounds.
But everything else is in there.
But in terms of the editing, to get those grays, to get that shading, if you look at the way the sun comes through the horse's legs and there's different tones, that's the stuff you want to get just right. And this started so nice, I didn't want my clumsy hand and eye to mess it up. I did very little with it. It was a light touch, but I was so tickled with that. Like I say, it was almost intimidating to get it right, and then I got it as right as I can.
Lori Walsh:
That's an interesting artistic problem to discuss, when you're intimidated by your own moment. Am I up for this?
So I want to go back off that kind of thought to your first camera and your first pictures. When did you get a camera placed in your hand and decide this was something that was more than just a little fun? When did you start taking it seriously?
Jeremiah Murphy:
Well, I took it seriously in high school and college. The first camera I ever used, my dad had this Mamiyaflex twin lens reflex camera.
And just picture, it's the kind of a camera you had to look down into, like a brownie but with vastly better lenses. It had the viewfinder in top and you would turn this crank on the side to focus it. It's a real machine. It's a beautiful machine.
In fact, my dad gave it to Hunter years ago. Hunter was visiting. He was a student at state college and he went to visit his grandparents one day, and my dad was showing him different stuff and Hunter was just really enjoying that camera as a beautiful machine. And Dad said, "Well, you should just have it." So Hunter still has that camera.
But in any event, I had that. And I wasted a bunch of film and I wasted a bunch of my dad's money down at Harold's, and my folks got me my own camera. They got me a 35-millimeter Pentax for Christmas when, I think, I was a sophomore. And then that's when I got serious.
And then when I was college age, I would take pictures in bars. I went to the Pomp Room a lot, and you'd shoot bands there.
Eventually, I moved to Los Angeles and cooler bands, cooler bars, and I did that. I was a hobbyist, but I guess a serious hobbyist. I would print my own stuff. They had rental dark rooms in Los Angeles in the '80s, which is a cool thing.
Moved back to South Dakota with my wife after Hunter was born. We had two more kids. Took a lot of soccer and volleyball and track and field and football, and that was great.
But honestly, with this, I ratcheted it up kind of at the same time. I talk about it in there.
My first rodeo, it was the old Crazy Horse Rodeo. They don't do it anymore, unfortunately. But I went to that and I was just drawn in. I looked this morning, that it was 138 rodeos ago. And so I've been developing my craft a lot, I think at the same time I've been developing this interest in rodeos.
Lori Walsh:
What year would that have been, do you think?
Jeremiah Murphy:
Well, that was 15 years ago, so 2010. Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. But motion, from the bands to the soccer to the athletics that your kids are part of it immediately. Because photographers can become obsessed with various subject matters. For you, it's got to be in motion.
Jeremiah Murphy:
Yeah, motion, action. This was the fun of living in Los Angeles. We lived just two blocks from a place called Club Lingerie on Sunset Boulevard, which was just a good solid rock and roll club. And The Blasters would play down there, and Los Lobos and bands like that.
And one night there was a band playing. They were called Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs, and he said, "We've got a guest tonight we want to bring in for you and sing a couple of songs," and it was Tom Waits.
Lori Walsh:
Oh, wow.
Jeremiah Murphy:
I'll fight anybody who says they're a bigger Tom Waits fan, which is a terrible way to put it. But anyway, and there was Tom Waits.
You had to bracket everything then, because you're shooting in a dark bar, he's spot-lit. So there's this white face that takes up maybe 10% of the frame, and 90% is darkness. So you shoot one frame at 1/250, and one at 1/25th, and you're tweaking stuff. I got a couple of happy accidents with him where it's actually kind of blurry, but if you know Tom Waits, you go, "Oh, yeah, there it is."
Yeah, of course with sports, that's all action. And rodeo, there's so much action it'll just make you crazy. There's also faces. There's also people and characters, and I'm really drawn to that.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, because when you mentioned Tom Waits and I look at the rodeo pictures here in The New Yorker, there are a lot of character faces. There's lines, there's expressions, there's youth, but there's injury, there's pain, there's humor.
What are you looking at through the viewfinder? Are you capturing the expressions accidentally because you're looking at the motion in the horse and trying not to get hurt? How are you making some of the decisions that you're making so that not everything is a happy accident and a lot of this is really skill, developed skill?
Jeremiah Murphy:
A lot of it's just practice.
I'll be honest, I'm not great at capturing a bronc rider at the absolute moment. I can do it, but boy, I miss a lot, because different horses have different rhythms. You just do it, and you just keep doing it and doing it.
So some of it is that, is I'm looking for that horse at a certain point, and I'll come back later and go, "Wow, that guy had that amazed expression or that big grin because he knows he's going to get a high score." And then there's other shots when it's kind of quieter.
I remember very distinctly, there's a shot in there where there's a stock contractor. There's a horse who has one leg over the edge of the chute. It's a chute where they bring the horses in before they get in front of the riders.
And this horse has just said, "To heck with it," and his right leg is up and over the edge of the chute. There are two women, one with this sort of Audrey Hepburn sunglasses on top of her head, and they're tugging at the horse's mane and the horse is just sort of looking off like, "I don't even..." It's really fun. And that was a real slow moment, and you just saw everything.
Sometimes you look and you go, "Oh, there we go." It can range from you're in the middle of a havoc and later you figure what you got, to other quieter moments and it's like, "That's cool. I want to capture that."
Lori Walsh:
I think Casey does a great job, the writer of this piece, at pointing out that these pictures are not romanticized, they're not precious. Tell me a little bit about your philosophy. But they're also not gratuitously cool. Do you know what I'm saying there? She says it better.
Jeremiah Murphy:
No, I think I do. She talks in there too about how I don't do the typical, the postcard image. There are great people doing that, and those are great images to have and there are some wonderful photographers doing that.
I probably can't express it well. I look for stuff in the edges. I look just a little off to the side. Kind of like driving down the highway at dusk and you're keeping an eye on the ditches for deer. That's what I'm looking for here, is to take away something unusual. I'll go to a rodeo and pull up in the parking lot and I'll just about grin, because you just know there's all this material in front of you. It can feel selfish. It's like, "Oh, this is for me." Well, no, of course it isn't, dummy. But there is so much going on and so many people and so many characters.
Some of my shots are just the good old, man, that horse's legs are outstretched front and back, and the rider's perfectly in sync, and it's a picture you would've seen 100 years ago. But others are a little different. It's difficult to explain what I'm looking for other than what I put down on paper and say, "Here's what I saw."
At the end of the day, that's what this is, is I'm saying to you, "Here's what I saw that I thought you might get a kick out of." You, the viewer.
Lori Walsh:
Here's what I saw, you might get a kick out of it. Here's what Casey says, and I want to ask you about this, "Baseball is America's pastime, and football, America's sport, but rodeo may as well be America itself. Cowboys alongside clowns, raw courage along with pure idiocy, a never-ending tug of war between sincerity and spectacle, myth and reality."
Which brings us to this idea of these pictures and what it says. What does rodeo say about America? What does it say about South Dakota? What does it say about who we are in our relationship with each other?" You agree with her there? Is this a look at America?
Jeremiah Murphy:
Yeah, I think so. I think that was fair. Frankly, I love that passage, and I think she gets a lot, and I think there is a lot to that.
It's interesting because it's people who are self-chosen because they enjoy either engaging in or watching that sport. That's what brings us all to that arena, is we want to see a good show, and/or we want to put on a good ride, and/or we want to put on a ride that's going to get us some money that'll help make our way to the national finals. The politics are generally conservative. This is western South Dakota. There will be rodeo clowns traditionally will make political jokes and that sort of thing, but they're sort of the dumbest, lamest. The politics is there, but it's sort of off to the side.
There will be an anthem, the rodeo queens will come out with various flags, the US flag, tribal flag, stuff like that. Typically, there will be a tribal honoring song and a real strong acknowledgement of that culture and where we are. And then everybody's kind of looking to see a horse buck, looking to see a girl rope a calf in 0.0 seconds, that sort of thing.
And so we're just there doing that, and then I think the points that Casey makes and how all that comes together. And it is crazy and there are clowns, and there are incredibly talented athletes. I think she describes it verbally as well as I can.
Lori Walsh:
Some of what we're doing is really stupid. This is really a bad idea. Everybody's going to get hurt. There's nothing safe about this.
Jeremiah Murphy:
No. Those bulls, if you look at old film—you guys do a nice job. You have a few films up on your website and that you broadcast of rodeos, say, like in the '50s or '40s—look at those bulls and look at the bulls and horses and my pictures. And frankly, from here, if you look at the bulls and horses at the national final rodeos, it's like looking at an NFL player today versus one in 1955. The animals are faster and stronger, and the riders though still seem to be about 150-pound skinny ranch hands.
Lori Walsh:
And you get to know folks.
Jeremiah Murphy:
Oh, yeah.
Lori Walsh:
You also say that you might be photographing them at the worst moment of their life, because some people do get hurt permanently. So tell me a little bit about your relationship with people when they see you get out of the car. What are they saying?
Jeremiah Murphy:
People are just really nice too. I am well-treated at rodeos, and I think that's because it's kind of generally folks' nature. And yeah, I've gotten to know a lot of people. There's a family element to it. There are generations of families. The Waters, the Vasus, the Longbreaks go back forever with bronc bucking. Marty Jandreau, who now is a judge, was a champion back in the '70s.
So there's history there and there's families and all of that. And so, I'm well-treated. I work very hard to stay out of the way, my one idiotic incident notwithstanding. I really try to make myself invisible. There's a lot going on behind the shoots where I am.
What I do, I share my pictures and I suspect that helps my treatment. Because I'll put stuff up on Facebook and people enjoy them, and I'll try to tag people when I know who it is. So that helps the relationship quite a bit.
But before any of that, you're well-treated there. You treat people well in rodeo, and my experience is they'll treat you well.
Lori Walsh:
You're giving something back, because they get to see. They don't see this. I mean, it happens so fast, they don't even know. Maybe they don't even know what happened. And they remember the ride might've been good, but then they see the image and they have something.
Jeremiah Murphy:
Yes. There's some give-and-take in the relationship. But frankly, like with a lot of things, if you show somebody you're interested in what they're doing and curious about it, they're generally with you.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. What's next for you?
Jeremiah Murphy:
More of the same.
Lori Walsh:
Books? Exhibitions? Do you do shows?
Jeremiah Murphy:
In this regard, yes, that's next. Hunter and I are working on some stuff, and this is as good a stepping-off point. I'm just incredibly lucky to have this happen. And now, yes, I want to take advantage of this and leverage that and put some of my prints in people's hands and get them hanging on some walls that people can come see.
Lori Walsh:
Is the rodeo alive and well? What's the future of this sport, especially in South Dakota, especially in reservation, in tribal country?
Jeremiah Murphy:
Exactly. I worry about rodeo. There'll always be the big rodeos, I think. They will fill the Stanford Center for that big deal, and that's great.
The smaller rodeos, I fear for. Well, I'll put it this way. We have three children. They're now in their late 20s and 30s, so they were in school at the turn of the century. That's a weird thing to say. But they and their classmates, a very low percentage of them went to football and basketball games, and that really surprised me. When I was a kid in the '70s, everybody went to football games, everybody went to basketball games. We weren't big sports fans, but that was where the social life happened. If you wanted to know where the party was, you went to the basketball game because the parties would be after. If you wanted to chase girls, you went to the basketball game. All of that.
That doesn't happen any longer. It hasn't happened for a while. And I think that's high school sports, I think that's small rodeos. It's movies, for heaven's sakes. You go to the movies now and the parking lot is 80% empty at 7:30 on a Friday night. And so I fear that we're all getting out of the habit of going places and doing things.
Fifteen years isn't a lot of time in one sense, the crowds are smaller. And so not for rodeo per se, but as an event that people attend, I think it's in the same trouble that high school sports and theater and a lot of other things are, which is a shame. Because I'll tell you, it is just the coolest thing to go there and sit in an arena and see that happen in front of your face and hear that noise and see all of that. You're missing out if you're missing that.
Lori Walsh:
My first rodeo was in Hawaii and a friend of mine was going to ride bull in the Marine Corps, and I was like, "Okay, I'll come watch." And I was so terrified. The adrenaline of being in that. I mean, it was intense. I was like, "Oh, oh, this is serious stuff."
Jeremiah Murphy:
Yeah, yeah.
Lori Walsh:
It only lasted about half a second for him, by the way, but it was his first try.
Jeremiah Murphy:
That's a half a second more than I would ever dare ride.
Lori Walsh:
I would not. Oh, God. Yeah, exactly.
Jeremiah Murphy:
Won't get any grief from me.
