Imagine trying to profile an entire state through photographs. Each one of the 50 manifests its own personality shaped by climate, natural resources and history, and even if you took 1,000 or 10,000 images, the task would remain elusive. Jonathan Charles (J. C.) Leacock, through skill, patience, luck and extraordinary understanding of the West, has accomplished a photographic composite of two Western states, Colorado and South Dakota. More than an Aaron Copland hymn, Leacock’s West is a breathtaking panorama, populated by birds and mammals, but also by men and women. In his visual journey through Colorado (‘Our Colorado’), for example, we meet National Park employee Bob Kisthart, dressed in the buckskins of a deerhunter to recreate life at Bent’s Old Fort, the only trading post along the Santa Fe Trail. We see Crested Butte resident Elizabeth Becker riding her bicycle rigged with a ski rack on her way to the slopes. In ‘South Dakota, Simply Beautiful,’ we observe cowboys herding cattle at the Krogman Ranch in Mellette County and Miss Rodeo 2003 posing with her horse in Wessington Springs. It’s interesting that Leacock, a local boy who grew up in Pacific Palisades, graduated from Palisades High School (1978), then went off to UC Santa Barbara, would fall in love with the mountains and grasslands of the western plateau. Maybe the clue is that he refers to this part of America as cowboy country. His late father, Philip, a director and producer of films and television, had a lot to do with his passion for the American West. ‘He enhanced my interest through his work with the classic Westerns of the day, ‘Gunsmoke’ and ‘Bonanza,” Leacock says. ‘Horses, gunfights and Marshall Dillon not only inspired my imagination but were also, in a sense, real.’ Not only did these memories fuel J.C.’s visual expansiveness, but the lifestyle was seductive. He really is a cowboy, having learned to ride when he was a boy, and here affirms the visual metaphor of cowboy and West over and over in his work. ‘When I was growing up we lived in Australia for three months while my dad was making a movie, ‘Adams Woman’ with Beau Bridges,’ Leacock says. ‘I rode every day.’ These days, he lives on a ranch near Crested Butte in southwest Colorado with his wife Kriste (a high school math teacher), horses and cow dogs. Leacock, 44, was interested in taking pictures from the time he was a little boy. ‘My dad was a great influence, but also my grandmother Enid Slater.’ He used to visit Slater, his maternal grandmother, in London every other summer. ‘She had her own darkroom and gave me my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic.’ His mother, Carol, an inveterate hiker and environmentalist who started the Temescal Canyon Association in the early 1970s, has been a great inspiration to J. C. ‘I used to go on hikes with my parents,’ Leacock says. ‘When I was younger before [developer Earl] Lachman destroyed it all, we hiked in Las Pulgas. I know all the species of plants and all the flowers; it’s where I learned about nature.’ Like an artist who carries a sketch pad wherever he goes, Leacock took his camera wherever he wandered. After graduating from Santa Barbara’with a major in environmental science and geography’and Brooks Institute, he assisted a professor doing soils research on the Channel Islands, and naturally was taking photos the whole time. ‘I scammed every way I could to get out to the islands,’ he says. ‘And then I thought, ‘If I could make this [taking photographs] a living, that would be very cool.’ Things worked out for him: his work is widely published and has appeared in Backpacker, National Geographic Adventure, Sunset and American Cowboy as well as in Sierra Club, Audubon and Western Horseman calendars. ‘I’m a Colorado photographer,’ Leacock says, while admitting that to record the whole state was a tough assignment. ‘My contract for the Colorado book was for three years, but it was hard to put a time line on it. It’s such a diverse state, you have to try and capture that and plan accordingly. ‘To shoot the wildflowers you just have to go the best spot in the mountains in July and wait. It just so happens that because of its elevation and rainfall, Crested Butte is the wildflower capital of the Rockies.’ In fact, Leacock’s signature shot is that of the Colorado columbine, the state’s official flower. In the photo, Leacock photographed the snow-white blossom with the rose-tinted streamers emerging gracefully from the leaves of the false hellebore, in a terrific shot as magical as a watercolor. Leacock has been accused at times of enhancing his photographs with Photoshop to explain the dramatic lighting and rich colors. ‘Some people have looked at my Web site and say the photos are too saturated. I say if you take advantage of the right kind of light and the right kind of film, you get this rich saturation.’ My landscapes to this day, and even the stuff that is published, have never been manipulated by Photoshop.’ To the uninitiated, Leacock’s books seem most comprehensive, but there are inevitably the ‘shots’ that got away. In the Colorado book, he would have loved to include the Denver skyline, the Denver Broncos and the Denver International Airport’which turned into an impossibility following September 11. His most difficult shot, he says, was the skier jumping off a cornice at Monarch Ski Resort in Colorado, a curious statement from a guy who captured a fearless cowgirl competing in a South Dakota goat-tying event at the most dust-swirling moment. ‘I’m not generally a sports photographer, and I never did a guy flying off a cornice; I didn’t know what to do. Luckily, it worked out well.’ Leacock, who uses a 6 x 7 cm Pentax for medium format landscapes and a 35-mm for action and people, takes slide film, explaining that his clientele’mostly magazines and calendar companies’are not ‘quite ready to look at a computer screen.’ He has over 50,000 transparencies in inventory. For ‘Our Colorado’ he sent the publisher over 500 images to choose from, including the extraordinary cover shot of Red Mountain No. 1 reflected in a lake near Red Mountain Pass. This photo was the result of his search for reflections. ‘I saw this body of water as I was driving along and thought, What the heck, there might be a good reflection.’ Like many who make a living as an artist, Leacock says that 90 percent of his time is dedicated to office work. ‘It seems that I am making endless phone calls, submitting images to clients, mounting, labeling, captioning and doing some writing.’ He wrote all the captions for the ‘Our Colorado’ and ‘South Dakota, Simply Beautiful,’ and for the October 2003 issue of Cowboys & Indians contributed an article on cowboys and girls. ‘I love cowgirls. They’re strong and independent and rope and ride. And half of them can do it better than anyone else.’ Leacock’s photographs are registered with four stock agencies, and he is looking forward to his next assignment with the state of Colorado, which has contracted with several photographers to document the entire state. ‘They hired me to document the south-central region, which includes Salida, Canyon City, Pueblo, Del Norte and Monarch Sky.’ For a guy who has a sizable inventory on his adopted state already, Leacock is challenged. ‘This is still a pretty big chunk of the state.’ The hardcover books ($24.95) are available through Village Books on Swarthmore.
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