What happens when a top commercial photographer with deep experimental chops and cowboy culture fascination has free rein to artistically roam with a lens for 43 years? A seminal photography book of the West like you’ve never seen.
I’m having a problem during my interview this morning with photographer Jim Krantz. Sure, it’s the most fun kind of problem you can have while brunching with a warm, prolific, idiosyncratic artist sporting a wild array of stories from the field and a grab bag of conversational interests ranging from motorcycles to music to urban conservation to pioneer experimental photogs like Henry Holmes Smith (“Do a Google search, you’ll find him fascinating”) to Rick Rubin’s new book about creativity (“Read it. I know you’ll enjoy it”). The problem is this. To borrow a term from Jim Krantz, I can’t quite get a rope around the conversation.
This is especially true when discussing many of the remarkable images in Krantz’s new photo book, Frontier. I can’t even begin to get a rope around those.
“I think it’s best not to get into the whole technical nitty-gritty of all that, because it’s really funky stuff — techniques I’ve been developing for years,” Krantz advises, gently steering away from any detailed explanation about how certain experimental images in the large, linen-covered art volume published this summer by London-based GOST Books were actually created. “It’s hard to get a rope around it.”
Turning 70 this fall, the Omaha-raised, L.A.-based artist and commercial photographer is clearly in the zone, donning a ballcap and faded gray jeans while working through a BLT at a neighborly spot in the Hollywood Hills called the Beachwood Café (known widely from a name-check in a Harry Styles song, which explains half of the crowd here). Krantz greets the waitstaff and several local patrons like old friends. “This is my other office,” he half-jokes. His Beachwood Canyon home is about a block or so from our table. The famed Hollywood sign is just up the road, looming over the historic hillside neighborhood like an all-purpose movie title. Earlier this morning, Krantz was up there shooting for a Red Bull project, photographing a YouTube celebutante leaping off one of the letters. Later this evening, the gig will continue in the backyard of the historic Goldwyn House nearby, where Krantz will be capturing more stunts at the bottom of the pool with scuba gear. He has some diving stories, too — amid more digressions than you can shake a sandwich at, but let’s circle back to the book.
Krantz’s images of the West in Frontier are an evocative blend of dazzlingly layered experimental works that can feel simultaneously inviting and distant, vast cinematic-style portraits straight out of a John Ford set, and stark black-and-whites that present yet another haunting angle of the West. Cowboys loom large in various shapes and forms throughout these pages — and sometimes small or strange, dwarfed by timeless terrain and shrouded by playful and mysterious experimentalism.
“The title of this book represents the boundary between the known and the unknown, a space where I’ve always felt most inspired,” Krantz writes in the introduction of Frontier. “Whether in the vast landscapes or the solitary figures of cowboys, I see a metaphor for life itself — navigating the chaos, finding purpose, and embracing the challenge of the unfamiliar.”
Millions have viewed Krantz’s commercial work for major U.S. brands, ranging from Wrangler to Marlboro — as well as uncredited photos famously appropriated by artist Richard Prince, leading to a 2007 New York Times article entitled “If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original?”
Krantz’s fine art has been exhibited at Colette, Paris and Danziger Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. His images in Frontier — all of them untitled and uncaptioned — are a wordless Western dreamscape that prod questions genially fielded by an artist who’s as engaging and interesting as he is tough to get the whole rope around. The following chat started at the crowded Beachwood Café and gravitated across the street to a quieter private patio at a neighbor’s house with a burbling fountain, an old golden retriever staring down from an open gable window, and Midwestern assurances from Krantz that no one will mind if we sit here. “We’re all friends.”
Cowboys & Indians: At 5 a.m. this morning, you were photographing a stuntperson leaping off the Hollywood Sign for Red Bull. Now, you’re brunching with us in Beachwood Canyon to discuss your new photo book, Frontier. Later this afternoon, you’ll be snapping more action pics at the historic former Hollywood Hills home of Samuel Goldwyn — specifically in the backyard pool with scuba gear on. For a photographer with deep Midwestern roots, that’s about as La La Land as it gets. Is this a normal Wednesday?
Jim Krantz: Well, this isn’t exactly a normal job, so maybe. Between commercial work and my own art projects, I’ve always been kind of a nonstop person and a compulsive explorer with a camera wherever I happen to be. As far as geography goes, I may live in California and love the tight-knit creative Beachwood community where my wife Susan and I are now based, but I’m not an L.A. boy. I’m really just an adaptable Nebraskan who enjoys operating in a lot of different situations — especially ones that are unfamiliar, which is when I tend to do my best work. But I’ll tell you, as familiar as that Hollywood Sign has become, it’s still so damn cool to be standing beside those giant staggered letters. They’re about 58 feet tall, and just so beautiful and iconic — and fragile. I’m also quite involved with the sign on the foundation end, too. We really need to protect all that landscape around it, so it doesn’t burn.
C&I: What led you to L.A.?
Krantz: I was working here and out West a lot, and as my career evolved it just started to make more sense to move from Chicago, where we’d been based for years after leaving Omaha. This was a little over a decade ago, and three of my longtime friends — wonderful people who I’d known since childhood — had passed away. Things like that tend to both heighten your awareness of age and tweak your perspective. Susan and I had the same thought: We’re only here for so long. Let’s try something else.
C&I: Many an L.A. story has arisen from that thinking. Before we cut to your book, Frontier, what was the opening scene of your middle-aged move here?
Krantz: Our first Los Angeles dwelling, rented sight unseen, was this dumpy little spot on the ocean way up in Malibu almost at the Ventura County line — miles from L.A. proper, we realized a little after the fact. We showed up at this place, Beverly Hillbillies-style, like total fish out of water, and were like, “This is it?” Then, we did the only sensible thing and bought a surf board, which I’d never done in my life. I like to try a lot of things — and dare to fail. Over the next two years, we bounced between at least five other apartment rental and Airbnb stops across the city, and for some time it felt like nothing was working. It was kind of a low point. We almost packed up and moved back to Omaha.
C&I: Hollywood ending to the rescue?
Krantz: We landed upon the perfect little home in this incredible Beachwood Canyon community about eight years ago — through some dumb luck and the keen eyes of our daughter who went to UCLA and works out here in the entertainment industry. And we’ve been here ever since. As I’m sure many others who’ve come to this city have discovered, when L.A. is good it’s great. And when it’s not, it’s really not. I still love meeting up with my L.A. biker buddies from various shoots here and riding my motorcycle up the Pacific Coast Highway — right past our original Malibu spot — to Neptune’s Net or The Rock Store on Sunday mornings. But, if you ask me where home is, I’d still say Nebraska.
C&I: Frontier is your first photography book in a long, varied, and adventurous career that’s carried you and your camera all over the world. How did this project come about and what drew you to a Western theme?
Krantz: One of the interesting things about this book to me is how it just sort of happened. I’ve never really had an agenda of doing anything more than working, and very seldom do I look back. I think the book originated out of this rare moment where I glanced in the rearview and realized how far I was from where I’d started, how long I’d been doing this, and how much stuff I’d created. Boxes full of images, paintings, drawings, and other works expressed in different mediums — a lot of which I hadn’t done very much with.
Susan and I have this beautiful library of art books. One day, I was looking at them and thinking about my own large collection of work, then wondering — quite spontaneously — If I had a book ... That thought led to an interesting conversation about seven years ago with Stu Smith, who’d become my incredible publisher at GOST, and the beginning of a book journey that turned into Frontier. It comes out of a vast hodgepodge of images created at different periods and places all over the American West. Stu did such an incredible job sifting, editing, and distilling all of what you see here, and GOST created this gorgeous book. The linen cover is made within 50 miles of the print shop in Verona, Italy. And check this out ... [Krantz unwraps his fresh copy of Frontier and demos a hidden visual effect between a large black-and-white photo on the book’s gray linen cover and three small vibrant color images on its laminate overlay — which disconnect from the cover photo but also meld with it seamlessly.]
How cool is that? That black-and-white shot on the cover is the oldest image in the book, shot in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1981. And these color images on the laminate are the latest, from 2024. They’re 43 years apart, and they form these two endpoints of my version of “the story of the West” throughout these pages. My fascination with the West originated from an early immersion of real-life cowboy scenes at the Omaha stockyards that were located right next to my father’s furniture store where I worked as a kid — and where I’d sneak off to watch the ropes spinning, horses tearing around, and cattle being herded. All of that action stoked an ongoing interest in cowboys and the wild landscapes of the West. It was a natural theme for this book.
C&I: The photos in Frontier wander freely and broadly: extreme close-crops of horsemen and charging bulls; experimental images that could pass in some cases for abstract paintings; grand-scale color and monochrome cowboy scenes of a mythical West straight out of a movie set; stark black-and-white interiors of grim motel rooms, sunburnt Pepsi signs, and dozing rattlers in the middle of nowhere. What’s your definition of the West?
Krantz: That’s just the point — there really isn’t a single one. Far from it. It’s just so vast and varied. To me, the West symbolizes so many different things, many of which are more conceptual than geographical. Authenticity, simplicity, natural beauty, rugged individuality, and a certain grittiness and timelessness. Equal parts romanticism and harshness. Most importantly, I feel like the West embodies freedom and an inclination to take chances and delve into uncharted spaces — creatively, too, like this book.
C&I: Hence, the title — Frontier?
Krantz: To me, frontier represents the area between the known and the unknown — which is certainly a Western theme, too. Just like those 1849ers venturing from familiar areas into these vast mysterious spaces, this book aims to follow that same sort of trajectory. Much of the artwork is reaching into a remote and experimental place that viewers will likely be unsure about. A frontier of sorts.
C&I: How would you describe your experimental methodology to a viewer who’s drawn to these wildly multilayered images while trying to parse exactly what you did to make them happen?
Krantz: Well, the first thing I’d probably do is try and dissuade you from heading into those weeds. [Laughs.] Because I’m telling you, this process is very funky, technically esoteric as hell, something I’ve been developing over years, and probably none of it’s going to make much sense in any brief explanation. Basically, these are multimedia expressions of the West — using water, paint, projections, often multiple photos, and so on. I do a lot of work on big transparencies, and I paint on clear substrates — sometimes five or six layers of them. When you apply light to those layers, it produces shadows and creates all kinds of strange and interesting effects.
C&I: Do you always start with a photo before all the other artistry begins?
Krantz: Not always. Sometimes I begin with watercolors and opaque inks — and the transparency is different on both. Whereas the inks make a shadow, watercolors are transparent and project their image on a surface when mixed with light. When I’m painting with water and gels and then add light, that gel becomes an actual optical object — a lens of sorts — which casts these refractions and produces this very unusual look. [Noticing my blank, uncomprehending look] ... See? I warned you this stuff is pretty crazy and confusing. It’s a total trip. That’s where all this how-to business is going to take you.
C&I: Okay, turning around, let’s take this gorgeous double-paged blue and pink cowboy image with a background that looks like it grew straight out of a ponderosa pine trunk. All technical danger zones aside, what can you tell us about it?
Krantz: The wood in the background is the side of a barn photographed in Bend, Oregon. The actual landscape of the photo took place in Moab, Utah. Who would ever associate this pink color with a cowboy, right? Pink and cowboys generally don’t really go — but they do in this case.
C&I: Is the only rule in Frontier that there are no rules?
Krantz: I’ve never really been much of a rules guy with my work in general. You’ve gotta have sound technical abilities first in order to know when and how to break them. That one came to me directly at a young age from Ansel Adams, whose famous dictum was “Technical proficiency leads to artistic freedom.” It’s like when you’re driving a car and shifting gears, some of this stuff has to be almost subconscious — like muscle memory — or you’ll lose the moment, which can go fast, especially when you’re outside in changing light. You need to be in a headspace where all of your energy is going into what you’re seeing, because photography is really about seeing — and timing. Those two things. Where and when.
C&I: Where and when — and how — did you meet Ansel Adams?
Krantz: Carmel, California, in the early ’70s. I took a workshop with him when I was 18 years old.
C&I: Just like that? A teenager could sign up for a workshop with Ansel Adams in Carmel?
Krantz: He wasn’t quite the brand he’d soon become, and he ran these little workshops in a very different Carmel than today’s built-up version. Back then, it was an artist’s outpost populated with all these silver heroes of mine — Wynn Bullock, Brett Weston, Imogen Cunningham. ... Most of Ansel’s students were around his own age. Then there was this curious teenage kid jumping around. We’d go shooting. We’d print. We’d head over to Brett Weston’s house and darkroom. A lot of those famous Ansel Adams cypress trees everyone’s now seen were the same ones we shot out there.
C&I: What was he like?
Krantz: Exceptionally kind. He was this big, expansive person, with a great big laugh to match. He didn’t take himself too seriously — unlike his work — and there was something really nice about that, too. I have a photograph of Ansel Adams holding a photo of mine and casually talking to me about it. I was hungry for mentors back then. He knew how important that was, and he was quite an amazing one. He liked to see others succeed, as do I.
C&I: Ansel Adams, of course, made all those pioneering iconic black-and-whites of the American West, most notably Yosemite. He also had a bit of the cowboy in his personal aesthetic — those felt Western hats and bolo ties. So a guy drawn to cowboy terrain on a couple of levels. The American cowboy is Frontier’s dominant motif. What do you love about photographing them?
Krantz: They exude so much energy for one thing, and I’m drawn to things that are naturally energized. There’s also danger — I love the volatility of it — and a sense of rugged individuality, with lots of dirt and atmosphere and shifting weather, in a very dynamic situation. I like when there’s a certain chaos around me which I can distill into something succinct and elemental — and see through the clutter. Of course, from a cultural standpoint, cowboys are just so iconic. And while their job has basically never changed, I love to modify and sort of elevate the cowboy image into a whole new plane in my work. None of these are the same old sepia photographs one might associate with cowboys. I’m drawn to creating uniquely modern expressions of a classic subject matter.
C&I: Do you have a favorite place to shoot in the West?
Krantz: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Montana ...
C&I: Are you naming every Western state?
Krantz: It’s hard to choose. If I had to pick one place, it might be Moab. The drama of that red landscape blows me away every time. It’s just so beautiful.
C&I: Ultimately, what do you want people to take from Frontier?
Krantz: I hope these images will inspire freedom to explore and interpret the West however one wants with an open mind, because it’s such an exciting, dynamic, modern, cool, funky kind of place. It’s important to see it — and also to see it as you see it.
C&I: Is this why the pages of Frontier are devoid of any photo titles or captions? Let the viewers see it in their own way without any hints or headlines?
Krantz: Probably. I’ve never titled an image, other than numerically.
C&I: How do you know when you’re finished with a photograph?
Krantz: It’s a gut thing — along with an awareness that you can ruin something if you go too far. I rarely go back and rework things. I’d rather start another piece. But I also think spontaneity and taking chances are a big part of the process, too. You’ve gotta be open to making mistakes; mistakes can be the best thing that ever happened. That’s what’s crazy about all of this.
Frontier by Jim Krantz (GOST Books, June 2025): $100, 144 pages, 98 photos; order online at gostbooks.com/products/frontier. Join Jim Krantz on October 25 at 1516 Gallery in Omaha, Nebraska, for a special book signing and discussion with James Danziger from New York’s James Danziger Gallery (danzigergallery.com). Visit the photographer online at jimkrantz.com
From our November/December 2025 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of the artist
