THE HOURGLASS

When Jim Krantz was only 17—a year after his grandfather, an abstract-expressionist artist, gave him his first camera—he drove west in his 1962 Renault, from Nebraska to California, to find Ansel Adams. In a roadside phone booth in Carmel, Krantz tore out the phone book page on which Adams’s address was printed, then spent the next three years as his student, learning, Krantz says, that “the real road to artistic freedom is technical proficiency.”

Now one of the most successful commercial photographers in the world, Krantz has created iconic imagery for a range of brands, and his photographs have appeared in The New York Times, GQ, American Cowboy and Dossier. He is particularly celebrated for his pictures of the American West, a subject for which he and Adams shared a deep appreciation. Some of Krantz’s cowboy images were famously copied by the appropriation artist Richard Prince—a copy of Krantz’s work sold for a record $1.2 million at auction and even found its way into Prince’s retrospective at the Guggenheim.

Though Krantz’s images may be easy to copy, they are not easy to create; an inordinate amount of orchestration goes into capturing the color and extreme detail found in a Krantz photograph. “Red Rider,” the exclusive print Krantz has made available through Whisper Editions, depicts a real cowboy who wrangles and rides in Moab, Utah. Like all of Krantz’s images, it is transportive. “Photography is a reason to explore,” he says. “It’s kind of like a ticket. When I have a camera in my hand, it’s like I’m going some place. My eyes are open in a completely different way.”

Shop Krantz's edition with Whisper here.