Luis Fabini’s Cowboys of the Americas – The Eye of Photography

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During the summer of 2003, while traveling around northern Uruguay, I stopped at the end of a long day to greet a few gauchos gathered around a fire by the side of a dirt road. As is customary, they invited me to share mate, their traditional beverage. As we stared into the fire, the gaucho in charge of the mate passed it around the men, one at a time. They were cattle drovers, herding a thousand head of cattle back to the estancia. I took a chance and asked the eldest one, “Who is the gaucho?” After a long silence he said, “The gaucho is the land he treads upon.” The authority and conviction of the old gaucho’s words had an immediate impact on me, and the phrase would become the cornerstone of my work and my guiding compass as I embarked on a journey through South and North America, photographing the different groups of cowboys.