Books

For more than 20 years, photographer Robb Kendrick, a longtime contributor to National Geographic, has traveled around North America, visiting places where development has been kept at bay, where cellphones don't work and "to cowboy" is still an active verb.

Robb Kendrick

One of Robb Kendrick's tintype portraits captures teenage ranch hands in Nevada.

Mr. Kendrick fits in well not only because he is a sixth-generation Texan, raised in ranch country in the Panhandle, but also because of the unusual method of photography he favors, one patented and popularized at a time when the idea of the American cowboy was itself just being created.

He doesn't need batteries or memory cards or even film for his pictures. Mostly he just needs time, patience and lots of elbow grease. And as he labors, moving methodically from beneath the hood of his wooden box camera to a portable field darkroom, bearing wet iron plates that he has painstakingly prepared, he thinks of himself not as simply making pictures but also as taking part in the world of the cowboys who are the subjects of his otherworldly tintype portraits.

"The tendency of cowboys is to think of photographers as very demanding, high-maintenance people," Mr. Kendrick said. "And in the end, I think they really respect the fact that I have to work for these pictures. They respect any kind of honest hard work."

Cowgirl Stephanie Hagenbarth is the subject of one of Robb Kendrick's photos.

Mr. Kendrick belongs to a growing group of commercial and art photographers who have retreated in recent years from the ease and exactitude of the digital age and taken up the difficult, ethereal techniques of early photography, including the ambrotype (in which a unique image is created on a glass plate), daguerreotype (on polished silver) and tintype (usually on tin-plated iron).

The latest result of Mr. Kendrick's twin obsessions – with tintypes and the bow-legged anachronisms who continue to make their living on horseback – is Still: Cowboys at the Start of the Twenty-First Century (University of Texas Press, $50), a collection of 148 tintype portraits.

Robb Kendrick

A photo taken at the Bar B Ranch in Oklahoma is included in Still: Cowboys at the Start of the Twenty-First Century .

The pictures, made by exposing and developing the metal plates after they have been coated with a light-sensitive solution of silver nitrate, are a kind of ideal meeting of subject and style. Many of the cowboys pine to have been born in the 19th century. And the tintypes, with their sepia tones, blurred peripheries and ghostly aura, take the cowboys back to the era when such photographs were taken by traveling commercial photographers.

For the new book (and an earlier one, Revealing Character, published in 2005), Mr. Kendrick estimates conservatively that he has covered more than 40,000 miles of often lonesome road in his pickup and visited more than 60 ranches, towing a trailer that he uses as a darkroom.

He has long been drawn to cowboys as subjects, in part because he grew up around so many in Hereford, Texas, but also because he finds the endurance of their culture and mythology (more than 100 years after the last great cattle drives) to be as fascinating as that of other groups he has photographed, such as Sherpas in the Himalayas or the Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico.

"Many cultures threatened by so-called progress can lose much in a matter of one or two generations," he writes in the new book. "But cowboys – actual working cowboys, in all their manifestations – proudly and determinedly endure."