Seeing the Stampede through a photographer’s lens
Edgy volume was 10 years in the making
David Campion had a crisis of confidence at one point during his 10-year study of the Calgary Stampede.
Between 1995 and 2008, the British-born, South African-raised photographer and his wife, Calgary writer Sandra Shields, took in 10 stampedes.
All the while, Campion snapped pictures while Shields prepared what would eventually become the text for their book Cowboy Wild (Rocky Mountain Books, $39.95).
“I kept thinking ‘What am I doing?’ ” says Campion, from his home in Deroche, B.C.
“I’m not with them, photographing the events or people eating the mini-donuts or going on the wild rides.
“I’m looking almost at the edges, the corners. Then I realized I am, as a photographer as an artist, trying to work outside the conventional way of seeing things.
“And if you look at the Stampede photographs that are produced every year, they are interchangeable. You see the same thing year in and year out. In fact, they rewrite the myth every year.”
Cowboy Wild will get an official release Tuesday as part of the Wild West Wordfest, a three-day liter- ary event connected to the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth that starts Monday.
Through Shields’s prose and Campion’s gorgeous black and white photos, the book certainly showcases a side of the Stampede that is not usually a part of the brochures.
The images are intriguing, usually edgy and often questioning of the cowboy myth, offering a glimpse into quiet and often contradictory moments that happen every year in the margins of the spectacle.
In one, a native child in full traditional attire peers into a plastic Walmart bag.
Another is of the wall of a public washroom, which features a romantic painting of a cowboy on one side and urinals on the other. Yet another is of a crowded downtown street and features cartoonish images of well-endowed strippers and waitresses decorating a bar window
Neither Campion nor Shields say they were interested in offering a critique of the Stampede, just a different way of investigating how it takes over the city.
“We kind of got hooked on it,” says Shields, who grew up attending the Stampede as a child in Calgary. “It took a couple of years and then we both started to feel like there was something really profound going on here that was beyond the big mega-spectacle and the stuff that people love and don’t love.”