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Photographer John Stephen Hockensmith: wild, west

By Rich Copley rcopley@herald-leader.com

For many people, the mention of John Stephen Hockensmith conjures images of horses.

He might be best known as the photographer who produces the official winner's print and winner's collection of images from the Kentucky Derby, a job he has held since 2000. But the Georgetown photographer's equine experience extends far beyond the first Saturday in May. He has worked for a variety of farms and other Thoroughbred interests and shot many other breeds and styles of horses.

Hockensmith knows horses.

In 2007 and 2008, however, Hockensmith found himself in the Western United States in wide-open fields and on mountainsides, camping out in Indian reservations and photographing wild Spanish Mustangs in vigils that sometimes lasted 18 hours.

"Usually, you only get to experience something for the first time once," Hockensmith says, driving through Central Kentucky's horse country on a sunny early fall afternoon. "It is a rare privilege to get to experience something you think you know as if it was new again."

These horses did not live in luxurious barns, they were not meticulously trained, and in most cases they answered only to themselves.

It was a new way to experience the horse.

Hockensmith is presenting his images in a new book, Spanish Mustangs of the Great American West: Return of the Horse (University of Oklahoma Press, $49.95), and an accompanying exhibit on display at the Headley-Whitney Museum. It, of course, contains hundreds of pristine Hockensmith images, and it is based on possibly the most surprising thing the artist learned.

Images and research

"When I went out west, someone said, 'Well, you know, there were no horses here for 10,000 years,'" Hockensmith says. "I said, well I didn't know that. I should have known that. My question was, why didn't I know that?"

Hockensmith, like most anyone else who has read a history book or seen a cowboy movie, thinks of the horse as integral to the growth of the United States, particularly the American West.

But from the time of the last ice age until the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century, horses were extinct from North America.

With that knowledge, and the vast Western landscape set out before him, Hockensmith had his work cut out for him: documenting the Spanish equine bloodlines that repopulated the Americas and still run free across the West.

"The eight weeks that it took to compile the imagery pales in comparison to the 30 months of research," Hockensmith says.

One of the challenges was that he wasn't writing the winners' story.

Relearning horse history

"The old cliché is that the victor gets to write the history and the vanquished are left invisible," Hockensmith says, noting that it was primarily the Spanish who brought the horse back to America. "In today's history books, if you are raised in the East or anywhere in the United States, to get a good account of the Spanish, you really have to go to the Spanish history. It's not offered up in the Anglo version, or it's glossed over, romanticized or embellished to less than the truth. ... It's also vilified."

So Hockensmith set out to read books already on his shelf and find much more material to tell a story about the reintroduction of an animal that was brought back to America housed in cramped stalls and slings on boats that sailed from Europe to the New World.

Hockensmith thinks that there are much larger stories about culture and the importance of the horse in history.

"It's not about horses, and it's not about people," Hockensmith says over lunch at Wallace Station in Versailles with Headley-Whitney executive director Sarah Henrich. "It's about the time that exists between those two entities. The relationship between those two beings creates a culture, an Arabian culture if you go to the Middle East, or a World Equestrian Games culture if you go to the World Equestrian Games. It's the partnership."

Horse-human culture was the major point of Hockensmith's 2006 book, Gypsy Horses and the Travelers' Way: The Road to Appleby Fair, which took the photographer deep into the Gypsy world of England.