Photographer: Barbara Van Cleve

Genre
:: B&W
:: Horses
:: Western
:: Landscapes

Barbara Van Cleve’s heritage is rich with family history and firsthand 
experience. Her family’s ranch, the Lazy K Bar, was founded in 1880 on the 
east slopes of the Crazy Mountains near Melville, Montana. Her father, 
Spike Van Cleve, was a unique combination of writer, poet, Harvard scholar, 
and expert horseman-and "a pure quill Montanan," as her father once put it.

As a photographer, she has held a camera since she was 11 years old 
when her parents gave her a "Brownie" camera and a home developing kit. 
Her youthful interest in photography soon grew into a lifelong commitment. 
Ranch work also began early for Barbara. Barely six, she could be found 
helping at the corrals or sitting astride a horse. Ever since she has been 
documenting the "true grit" and romantic beauty of her experiences on the 
ranch and on other ranches in the West. 

Along the way, she earned an MA in English Literature at Northwestern 
University in Evanston, Illinois; she has been a Dean of Women at DePaul 
University in Chicago, Illinois; and she taught English Literature, and later 
photography, for over 25 winters at DePaul University, Loyola University 
and Mundelein College, all in the Chicago area. At the same time 
photography continued to be a passionate avocation. In her free time, she 
worked for Rand McNally as a textbook photographer and also established 
her own stock photography agency. The long summers were usually spent 
on the family ranch in Montana. 

She moved to Santa Fe in late 1980 to concentrate on photography full 
time and had her first major exhibition in the fall of 1985. Since that time 
she has had over 30 one-person shows and has been in nearly 60 group 
shows. Her work is in public and private collections in the United States as 
well as internationally. Her photography has been published in Roughstock 
Sonnets, (with poetry by Paul Zarzyski), Way Out West, and Cowboys: A 
Horseback Heritage. KOAT-TV, an ABC affiliate in Albuquerque, New Mexico 
produced and aired a thirty-minute video documentary, Barbara Van Cleve: 
Capturing Grace, in 1993. In the Fall, 1995 her book, Hard Twist: Western 
Ranch Women was published by Museum of New Mexico Press, and she 
was inducted into the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, 
Texas. All This Way for the Short Ride (with poet Paul Zarzyski) was 
published by the Museum of New Mexico Press in 1997. Her newest project 
is a book Holding the Reins written by Marc Talbert and illustrated with her 
photographs about ranch girls. It was published by Harper Collins in 
February 2003.

-June 2003-