Staring at my screen the other day, I actually noticed how little fun it has become. Everything is now plenty. Plenty perfect, plenty polished and plenty close to being machine-originated. Naturally, we cannot keep up with this perfection, and naturally, we return to our old ways. Hence, “TOUCH GRASS” is already spreading as a term emerging from newer generational bubbles.

Long before this became a social trend, the great photographers were already there: in the rodeo arena, on the open plain, in the dust and heat of an American myth that turns out to universally stand for FREEDOM.

“Calgary, on Horse” by ALBERT WATSON

Albert Watson photographed the Calgary Stampede in 1978 with the eye of a sculptor. In this image, a rider on his horse in mid-buck becomes pure form. Equipped with boots, fringe, and the muscular arc of the animal beneath. Watson strips away the spectacle entirely. No crowd, no arena, just a body present in a moment of beautiful, but inevitable failure. It is one of the most elegant photographs ever made about risk and why taking some is always worth it.

“Carmen Kass, Annie Get Your Gun, Vogue US, 2002” by ARTHUR ELGORT

“Christy Turlington & Naomi Campbell sitting, 1992” by ARTHUR ELGORT

Arthur Elgort understood that the West is the grandest stage America ever built. His 2002 Vogue shoot with Ralph Lauren is spontaneous in energy but meticulously perfect in composition. It is in direct dialogue with his quieter 1992 portrait of Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell, sitting on a sun-drenched Southern porch in cowboy boots. In both, the Western gesture is the same: I move through this world on my own terms.

“Brigitte Bardot in Les Pétroleuses, Standing” by TERRY O’NEILL

“Rod Stewart at his Home in Windsor 1971” by TERRY O’NEILL

Terry O’Neill had an extraordinary instinct for the moment a person becomes an archetype. His Brigitte Bardot, all in black, revolver at her hip, is more than a simple portrait. Its popularity is tangible: only one edition remains, while Sotheby’s has seen results above USD 100,000 for works still acquired through the regular gallery channel in the five-figure range. Beside her, Rod Stewart appears in a leopard-print suit with an Appaloosa mare, apparently unbothered by the impossible match of him and the horse.

“Equus -Lusitano Backs” by TIM FLACH

Tim Flach’s Backs brings us to the mere animal: no rider, no myth, no arena. It is a reminder that before the rodeo became a symbol, the horse was simply a living creature of breathtaking beauty. That is the thing people are returning to. Not the idea of freedom, but freedom as a tangible reality.

“The Last Supper – Fort Worth Stock Yards, 2024” by DAVID YARROW

“The image is funny and it is holy and it refuses to choose between them.”

David Yarrow’s Last Supper may be the defining image of the moment. Twelve cowboys and one woman are arranged at a long table beneath the iconic sign, and at the centre, where Christ would sit, a Longhorn steer. The biblical reference is unmistakable because what is the American West if not a myth itself? The image is funny and it is holy and it refuses to choose between them.

This is where the return to the elemental arrives at its conclusion: not plentiful nostalgia for a simpler time, but the realisation that plenty of things were here all along. Waiting for us.

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