- Breeding
- The Missing Equine Link: How the Modern Horse Came to Be
- OmegaTri & the Equine - Reducing Inflammation, Restoring Balance
- When Dealing With Horses Get It in Writing - Sign Up for May 16 FREE Webinar
- Buying a Horse
- What to Look For When Buying a Horse
- What do do when the Panic is On to keep our Horses Safe!
- Top 3 Ways Using Horse Classifieds Can Save You Money
- General Horse Articles
- Fire! Prepare to Evacuate Horses
- How to Ride a Horse: A Beginner’s Guide
- Paid Horse Ads vs. Free Horse Ads
- Horse Feeding
- OmegaTri & the Equine - Reducing Inflammation, Restoring Balance
- You’ve Got the Right Feed, Now What?: Proper Feeding Practices
- Keeping the Horse Replenished - Equine Electrolytes
- Horse Grooming
- Keeping Your Horse Beautiful with Horse Products
- What do do when the Panic is On to keep our Horses Safe!
- When Dealing With Horses Get It in Writing - Sign Up for May 16 FREE Webinar
- Horse Health Issues
- Vital Signs Tell Horse's Condition
- A Look at Horse Feed
- Keeping the Horse Replenished - Equine Electrolytes
- Horse Training
- What do do when the Panic is On to keep our Horses Safe!
- Training Mythunderstandings: Teach Your Horse Anything in 3 Simple Steps
- It's Hard to Get Back to Basics When You Haven't Been There To Start!
- Horses & History
- Top 5 Strange and Unusual Horses
- A Brief History of Draft Horses
- Battle-Ready: A History of the War Horse
- Horses & Sports
- Relive Southern Eighths/Nikon Three-Day on YouTube
- Nearly $7 Million Generated Annually for the District of Columbia
- Healthy Horse Boutique Supports Haddad Staller In Her Olympic Quest
Equine Photography: A Look at the Horse Photos Industry
03/30/2009
Horse pictures are, for horse lovers, a way of capturing their favorite companion, favorite pastime, and favorite memory all into one.
When I was a kid, my family would spend at least an evening a week at Barnes & Noble. My parents would get a coffee, browse through the stacks, and I would entertain myself looking through the big coffee table books. One day, I picked up a copy of Robert Vavra’s Unicorns I Have Known. Being 12, I honestly thought Favra had caught actual unicorns in the wild. It wasn’t until a few years later that I was crushed to discover Favra had taken horse photos with horn “props”, not unicorn photos. But despite Favra’s intense fantastical romanticism, his horse photos were still beautiful, and ever since, I’ve always kept an eye on the world of equine photography, and the horse pictures that result.
Horse pictures are big business. People often commission portraits of their horses the same way a bride commissions wedding portraits. Horse pictures are, for horse lovers, a way of capturing their favorite companion, favorite pastime, and favorite memory all into one. Some people who gravitate towards horse pictures—like Sally Mann—are professional fine art photographers who use horses as a way of expressing the raw energy of the Virginia backlands. Others, like CJ Wheeler, are primarily equine photographers, and focus their effort solely on horse pictures for the equestrian market. Here are our top 3 favorite photographers capturing horse photos today:
1. Sally Mann
Virginia-native Sally Mann is nothing if not controversial. She first came to the scene with her book Immediate Family, which depicted her naked, wild-haired children running amuck in the wilderness. Even back then, Mann was taking horse photos—just in a different ways. Rocking horse chairs, stuffed ponies, and a wooden horse…photos that represented Virginia’s changing landscape and untamed past. As she’s gotten older, Mann has turned away from portraiture towards landscape work, and this is where her horse photos become more powerful. Rather than having lifeless representations of horses, Mann’s horse pictures involve a man on horseback on the Antietam, or a horse standing still in the forest. And since all her photos—horse photos and otherwise—are taken on Civil-War-Era cameras, the pictures are always imbued with a soft, fuzzy, bleeding tone which echoes the majesty of her subject—and the loss of beauty that must inevitably come.
2. Scott Trees
Like Mann, Scott Trees is not an entirely equestrian photographer. But his high-drama horse photos have made him a huge name in the industry for their grace and poise. Though Trees does many kinds of horse photos, his best works are his close-range Arabian horse photos. By photographing the curve of the horse’s neck, a horse’s eye, a horse’s profile, in crisp high-relief, Scott Trees’ horse photos make the ordinary seem extraordinary.
3. CJ Wheeler
Equine photographer CJ Wheeler didn’t have the best interactions when it came to horses. Her horse photos show a sense of distance and foreboding with her subjects, and knowing her history, it’s easy to see why. When Wheeler was a teenager, she was thrown from her horse, cracking her skull so severely it took her 30 years to return to the equestrian sport. Her love of horses is evident in her horse photos, which depict Western scenes such as ranchers on horseback, feral horse herds, and lassoing cowboys. These same horse photos, however, are taken with the horses often in shadow or half light, the red evening light and early evening mist behind them. This gives Wheeler’s horse photos a sense of the supernatural, as if she were somewhere between a dream and a scary story.
