Kolyn Cruz, a senior at Daviess County High School, has been recognized with two prestigious Gold Key honors in the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards for his work in photography. 

The Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards, founded in 1923, is the nation’s longest-running recognition program for creative teenagers. Every year, it celebrates the vision, ingenuity, and talent of young artists and writers across the United States. Notable artists to receive a Scholastic award include Andy Warhol, Slyvia  Plath, Robert Redford, and Stephen King.

Cruz’s talent and dedication to the art of photography have earned him two Gold Key awards in this year’s competition.

“With the amount of the total submissions across the country and just picking up photography recently, it feels unreal to win two Gold Key awards,” Cruz said. “I am excited because this boosts my confidence in my photography portfolio and skills.” 

Mary Jo Greathouse, Daviess County High School’s arts teacher, expressed pride in Cruz’s achievements, highlighting his talent and ingenuity in photography since his first class in the fall of 2023. She noted his ongoing growth and skill development, emphasizing that his dedication to the craft has been evident from the beginning.

“Winning two Gold Keys in a prestigious competition serves as a testament to Cruz’s hard work, creativity,  and unwavering commitment to excellence,” Greathouse said.

Cruz’s Gold Key works are automatically advanced to the national level of judging, which takes place in New York City in June. 

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Chris Sessions photographing a Charrería event for the Colorado State Fair. (Courtesy of Adam Concannon)

On the second floor of Macky Auditorium in the office of the Center of the American West, photographs featuring men, women, children and their horses line clean, freshly-painted walls. Each photograph is the work of 1997 University of Colorado Boulder graduate Chris Sessions. Though many of the photos are in black-and-white, there’s an indelible sense of life and movement to them, denoting the color that lies beneath the filter.

The exhibition is titled “Charrería: Exploring the human-horse connection in Mexican Rodeo.” It features photographs taken over 12 years since Sessions became infatuated with Mexico’s national sport over a decade ago.

“It’s a really colorful community, but it’s more that they give off a sense of pride in their culture,” Sessions said. “That’s what really captured my interest … it’s a timeless tradition.”

Charrería is a robust historical and cultural rodeo tradition whose events resemble the American rodeo. It originally borrowed some equestrian practices from the Spanish charreada, but the artistic flair is also an integral part of the sport. The colorful attire and accompanying lively music and food are all inspired by indigenous Mexican art and differentiate it from American rodeos. 

There are about a dozen Charrería teams in Colorado, but the Torres family and their team, Las Delicias, lead the pack. Roberto Torres Sr. serves as President of La Federación Mexicana de Charrería en Colorado alongside his wife, Naiomy Torres. 25-year-old Carolina Herrera, who was born and raised in Colorado and joined Colorado’s charro community when she was 14, is the state’s Escaramuza Queen, representing the only Charrería event in which women traditionally participate.

Herrera says that among all the things she loves about the sport, her favorite is the connection that comes from this shared celebration of heritage. 

“It’s such a family,” Herrera said. “You create so many friendships, you meet new people, you get to go to different parts of the world – to Mexico, to different states here – it brings so much joy.”

Escaramuza, or skirmish, is only one event among ten different suertes, or activities, that charros participate in, but its color, showmanship and athleticism are representative of the rest of the sport.

“To me, being an Escaramuza is culture, it’s history, it’s color, it’s family,” Herrera said. “But the sport itself is an adrenaline rush. It consists of 12 different exercises, kind of like a drill team. We’re galloping at full speed, doing these intricate designs that we’re getting judged on.”

Sessions’ background photographing Charrería in Colorado began as an effort to document the parts of the state’s cultural legacies he felt were at risk of disappearing.

“Around 2010, it felt like the town I moved to Colorado for in the 90s was a lot different than the town it was becoming,” Sessions said. “It was becoming a lot more commercial, and older places that were around were kind of disappearing. So I started photographing county fairs and small towns on the eastern edge of town to document those places before they went away.”

Around that time, Sessions saw an ad for a Mexican rodeo at the Adams County Fairgrounds near Brighton. After attending the event, the spirit of the sport captivated him, and he came back year after year, photographing more and more each time. For Sessions, who is not Mexican nor a charro himself, the Macky exhibition is a culmination of over a decade of building relationships with the Torres family and Las Delicias. 

“As a photographer or documentarian, people are kind of wary,” Sessions said. “It took a long time for me to develop my own body of work that I could present to them, for them to welcome me into the community.”

Sessions’ work conveys an air of strength and timelessness, therefore attributing those traits to the larger community he photographs. Herrera said her favorite part of his photography is the eye for detail and the care he puts into representing her culture and community.

“I love his work … he had no idea what this sport is, and he’s gained such a good knowledge about our culture and the significance of it,” Herrera said. “He was able to realize the hard work and the time that we put into it, just to continue our culture here and to continue those Mexican-specific practices – the dress, the attire we have to wear, and everything that goes with it. For him to recognize and see the hard work of it is just amazing.”

Sessions’ exhibition is the Center of the American West’s first in-house art exhibition. The Center, which has been in operation since 1986, serves as an authority about the region of the American West and serves to highlight the West’s role in national and global issues through research, education and programming. 

Tamar McKee, the Center of the American West’s director of programs and operations, said the exhibit about Charrería is part of a larger effort to redefine the “cowboy” as larger than its stereotypical narrative of white masculinity in the American West. She said Sessions was the ideal candidate to express this message through his work.

“As an anthropologist, his depth of relationship and knowledge with the community that he’s photographing is just notable,” McKee says. “It’s not just a project for him. It’s the relationships and community he has with these riders … it really speaks volumes for his commitment, and what one can get out of this kind of art.”

McKee says the exhibition came at an inflection point for the organization and marks a philosophical shift moving forward. A year and a half prior to the exhibition’s opening, the Center faced a reckoning when its director and founder, Patty Limerick, was fired after alleged misconduct and the Center’s entire executive board resigned. Though McKee did not comment on those events, she says the exhibition is part of a marked philosophical shift for the Center and a beacon for its path forward.

“The center has always been a hub for bringing people together and making these connections happen both on campus and around the American West, and that spirit is still totally there,” McKee said. “What this exhibit does is it has so many more people sitting at the table in terms of collaboration …  It wasn’t just a top-down curatorial approach, which can sometimes happen in academia …  we instead wanted to make it more of a roundtable and a co-creative experience, which is continuously unfolding.”

Chris Sessions, Carolina Herrera and Tamar McKee at the Center of the American West. (Courtesy of Ryan Lueck)

The focus of the exhibition is the connection between humans and horses, which is a central part of McKee’s academic research and career. She said the connection between humans and horses is an enormous part of the story of the West and a signifier of the symbiotic relationship between humans and what she calls the “greater-than-human world.”

“Whether you were following horse herds or coming in on horseback or horse-driven carriages, our human ability to come into this land and be a part of this land is so much in relationship with animals, be they wild or domestic,” McKee said. “[The West] is a place that really reminds us that we’re in an order of things, we’re not all the things.”

Herrera says the human-horse connection is vital for her athleticism and is present in every part of her sport.

“These horses have to start from zero – they have to get trained, they have to get to the point where you’re able to put them inside of an arena to work with other horses, to be around other girls, to be around other heartbeats,” Herrera said. “You’re trusting your partner, which is the horse, to keep you safe and to accomplish what you’ve been training for.”

Sessions says that the intuition involved in the connection between the Charrería athletes and their horses is something that connects him and the community to their respective artistic mediums. 

“It’s really hard to put into words what the human-horse connection is, but it’s something that I have seen and experienced as I take the pictures – it’s almost more of an intuitive process,” Sessions said. “It’s similar to the way that I approach my own photography – it’s based on that intuitive motivation to capture the right moment.”

“Charrería: exploring the human-horse connection in Mexican Rodeo” is on display through October 17. It’s free to enter, located in the Center of the American West at the second floor of Macky Auditorium, and open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Lauren Hill at lauren.hill-2@colorado.edu. 

The celebrated butteri of Italy trace their history back 2,500 years. Gabrielle Saveri’s photography exhibit captures the history of Italy’s cowboys.

Beautiful bay-colored horses canter in the golden light of Tuscany. Riders with rough hands and proud faces work together in a dreamlike haze of dust, serious but with a sense of ease well-captured by the camera. Gray long-horned cattle lumber into rugged corrals. There’s a steely quality to the images, like the cowboys themselves — the celebrated butteri horsemen of Italy, who trace their history back 2,500 years to the pre-Roman era of the Etruscans.

Get an intimate glimpse inside their world at Italy’s Legendary Cowboys of the Maremma, a photography exhibit by Gabrielle Saveri on display through May 5 at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. “The iconic American cowboy has international and intercontinental antecedents and ancestors,” says Michael Grauer, the museum’s Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art. “There have been cattle herders in Asia, Africa, and Europe long before the first vaqueros in the Americas in the 1530s. The butteri of Italy are part of that great ‘cowboy tapestry’ worldwide.”

Gabrielle Saveri

Saveri is a photographer, writer, and artist based in Napa Valley, California. She first became interested in the butteri in the 1990s while working as a journalist in Rome. “I have always loved horses and I’ve ridden throughout the years,” she says. “Being Italian American, the moment I heard about these mysterious cowboys, I dreamed of going to ride with them, but I didn’t know how to find them.”

Almost two decades later, a chance encounter with another photographer provided the connection Saveri needed to track them down.

A few months later, she was riding alongside the butteri in their homeland of Maremma, a coastal region between Florence and Rome that stretches across southern Tuscany. The working cowboys move cattle and train horses in a landscape of rocky paths and rolling plains. Groves of pine trees rise above yellow wheat fields and grasses grow tall in summer meadows. Hay bales nestle under square Italian towers and open-air stables are roofed with curved Mediterranean tiles.

Fewer than 30 butteri are thought to exist today. Though widely admired across Italy, their way of life is threatened from multiple angles, including new European Union beef regulations and soaring grain prices caused by the war in Ukraine. Women have recently been allowed to join the group of cattle breeders and expert equestrians, whose traditions date back to the spread of agriculture on the Italian peninsula. Etruscan tombs from the sixth century B.C.E. depict mounted riders and charging bulls; the famed “Murlo cowboy” statue was found at an Etruscan archaeological site nearby.

La Mer — Butteri Wrestle a Maremmano Cow for Branding (PHOTOGRAPHY: Canino, Archival Pigment Print, 2019, 13″ x 19,” © Gabrielle Saveri. All Rights Reserved.)

More than two millennia of history isn’t the only thing that sets the butteri apart. The cowboys’ dapper sartorial style is both eye-catching and effortless: earth-tone cotton vests, dark brown leather boots, and unique narrow-rim hats. They ride on military-inspired saddles and carry hooked wooden sticks called mazzarellas to help open gates and herd cattle. Butteri also work with distinct maremmana cows and horses, which they rope in round wooden pens with large central stumps for support.

We’re welcomed into the butteri’s familiar-yet-unfamiliar world through Saveri’s rich treatment of textures: soft hides over rippling muscles, the easy tip of a straw hat, the mesmerizing grit of dirt and dust. Intriguing characters inhabit each frame; hardworking, hardscrabble all-business types — with slices of smiles peeking through. The metallic quality of the sunlight creates a multidimensional “pop” that complements the feeling of movement in the images, each conveying the magnificent beauty of the animals and the respect afforded them by the butteri.

“I have fallen in love with Maremma,” says Saveri, whose sensitive touch and obvious passion make her photography so arresting. “The butteri, like American cowboys, have a deep love for their horses and cattle, and their land,” she says. “Their practices, livestock and horses, and attire may be different from the Americans, but they both share their strong love of being cowboys — riding out in the open air, connecting with their horses and the natural world around them, and living according to the rich and colorful cowboy traditions of the world they were born into.”

Portrait of Two Riders (PHOTOGRAPHY: Pitigliano, Archival Pigment Print, 2016. 33″ x 50,” © Gabrielle Saveri. All Rights Reserved.)

The butteri may be struggling to save their ancient ways, but hope prevails. More than two dozen associations in Italy are dedicated to preserving butteri culture, as are the appassionati — devoted fans who are enamored with the cowboys, much like Saveri herself. They stage exhibitions, host Italianstyle rodeos, and offer farm stays for travelers who want to experience the butteri lifestyle and help with their daily tasks. It’s not for the weak-hearted; the tough work turns away many youths and would-be butteri. But not all.

Perhaps the hope for the butteri’s future is best encapsulated in Saveri’s photo of a young and eager rider on an inky-brown horse, his mazzarella staff ready for whatever comes next. It’s titled simply: Apprentice.

Italy’s Legendary Cowboys of the Maremma by Gabrielle Saveri is on display through May 5, 2024, at The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

From our May/June 2024 issue.

HEADER IMAGE: Buttero (Pitigliano, Archival Pigment Print, 2016. 13” x 19,” © Gabrielle Saveri. All Rights Reserved.)

French photographer Juliette Pavy won Photographer of the Year, for her series on the forced contraception and sterilisation of Greenlandic Inuit women.

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The World Photography Organisation has announced the overall winners of the Sony World Photography Awards 2024. 

French photographer Juliette Pavy claimed the coveted award for Photographer of the Year for her series Spiralkampagnen: Forced Contraception and Unintended Sterilisation of Greenlandic Women. The project explores a dark chapter in Greenlandic history where Inuit women were subjected to an involuntary birth control program. 

Pavy was selected from the 10 winners in the professional category; she receives a $25,000 prize, Sony equipment, and the opportunity to present a new body of work at the Sony World Photography Awards 2025 exhibition. 

Over 395,000 images from more than 220 countries and territories were submitted to the Sony World Photography Awards 2024, with the highest number of entries on record for the professional competition.

You can view Pavy’s award-winning photos below, as well as the winners of the other professional categories.

Juliette Pavy, Photographer of the Year

Project – Spiralkampagnen: Forced Contraception and Unintended Sterilisation of Greenlandic Women

Description – Between 1966 and 1975, Greenlandic Inuit women were subjected to an involuntary birth control program led by Danish authorities. This program, known as the Spiralkampagnen (spiral campaign), involved the implantation of nearly 4,500 intrauterine devices (IUDs), or ‘coils,’ into Inuit women and girls, some as young as 12. 

Pavy’s documentary project uses various photographic formats, including cityscapes of Nuuk, X-rays, archival photos, and portraits to raise awareness about violence against Inuit women and the psychological repercussions of the horrific campaign.

Siobhán Doran, Architecture & Design (1st Place)

Project – Sala Mayor (Living Room)

Description – The series is part of the book project “Houses that Sugar Built: An Intimate Portrait of Philippine Ancestral Homes,” which granted Doran access to historic mansions in the Philippines. The main living room, known as the sala mayor, is a focal point, showcasing the architecture and lifestyle of the people living there. 

Sujata Setia, Creative (1st Place)

Project – A Thousand Cuts

Description – This is an ongoing series depicting patterns of domestic abuse in the South Asian community. Inspired by the ancient Asian torture method of lingchi, or death by a thousand cuts, it portrays the cyclical nature of abuse. The portraits feature cuts representing the continuous chipping away at the soul of the abused, printed on thin paper to symbolise fragility. 

Mahé Elipe, Environment (1st Place)

Project – Echoes of the Hive

Description – The project examines the impact of the tragic poisoning of Melipona bees, sacred to the Maya people, in Hopelchén, Campeche, Mexico. Through photographs, Elipe aims to illustrates the significance of the bees to indigenous communities and the threats they face from agro-industry. 

Eddo Hartmann, Landscape (1st Place)

Project – The Sacrifice Zone

Description – This series explores a remote area of Kazakhstan known as ‘The Polygon’, which was once home to the Soviet Union’s major nuclear testing facilities. The images were made using an infrared camera, which hints at a menace that is equally invisible to the human eye: the radiation resulting from the nuclear explosions.

Valery Poshtarov, Portraiture (1st Place)

Project – Father and Son

Description – This project explores the emotional bond between fathers and sons, capturing the powerful moment when they hold hands after years or even decades of separation. Spanning across various cultures in Bulgaria, Georgia, Turkey, Armenia, Serbia, and Greece, it aims to promote emotional expression and cultural preservation.

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Thomas Meurot, Sport (1st Place)

Project – Kald Sòl (Cold Sun)

Description – Kald Sòl (Cold Sun) explores cold surfing in Iceland during the winter months. Through black-and-white photographs, it captures the harsh conditions of surfing in cold environments, even when the sun is shining.

Federico Scarchilli, Still Life (1st Place)

Project – Flora

Description – This project explores how plants produce medicinal substances that play crucial roles in both their own survival and human health.

Eva Berler, Wildlife & Nature (1st Place)

Project – Suspended worlds

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Description – This project started as an exploration of the world of spider webs for photographer Eva Berler, where both time and action are frozen, but it led to a personal journey into her deepest fears and aspirations. As she focused on what was hidden in the webs, she became fascinated by the artful random creations she found; the impermanent worlds that aren’t usually noticed.

Jorge Mónaco, Portfolio (1st Place)

Project – Portraits and Landscapes

Description– Jorge Mónaco’s images are part of various personal projects, some of which detach from the main body and function as independent pieces. His focus is on sincerity and authenticity, inviting viewers to explore into the intimate stories of the protagonists.

The Sony World Photography Awards 2024 exhibition at Somerset House, London runs until 6 May 2024, featuring over 200 prints and hundreds of images in digital displays from winning and shortlisted photographers.

If you want to engage your audience, tell them a story

Storytelling is key in creating impactful photos and can take several forms: a photo essay which lays out a story scene-by-scene, a single shot with enough detail to convey what exactly is happening, or – my favourite – the photos whose power lies in what they don’t include, leaving the viewer to imagine what was going on behind the shot. Photos that tell a story connect with us because they make us feel something – the same reason why ads that utilise storytelling are so effective. In ‘The Long and the Short of It’, Binet and Field conclude that emotional advertising is twice as efficient as rational, and delivers twice the profit. Stories don’t just capture our attention. They keep us engaged, and they stick with us afterwards. All the ingredients for an effective ad – and an impactful photo.

Perspective is everything

I often encourage myself to take a snap of something then move and take a shot from a different angle. After all, what looks like something from here will look very different to someone over there. This is practically the planner’s #1 golden rule, and yet something we all too often forget. “I just don’t think that line would make me want to buy it” must be one of the most frequently uttered sentences in every creative review. But what about Janet, the Brexit-supporting pensioner from Hartlepool? Can you walk out of your shoes for a moment and try and see things from her perspective instead? The view might be very different…

Detail is irrelevant if we can’t capture attention

On an early trip to South Bank with my camera, my eye was drawn to the big, impressive things – half the roll was dedicated to the London Eye. In fact, it took a Covid-induced stint of isolation, stuck with little more than Netflix and my camera for entertainment, to force me to find interest in the details that, in a busy and distracting world would never normally capture my attention. The detail of my mirror frame, the way the sunlight hit my bedsheets in the morning, the framing of the London skyline through my balcony doors.

Sadly, we don’t have the luxury of locking consumers in their bedrooms. This means as brands we need to be disruptive to cut through the noise and actually get noticed. There’s no use having a full body of copy detailing all the benefits of the product if there’s nothing to attract their attention to the ad in the first place. We need to be the London Eye to their Southbank.

Rules are there to be broken

There are several common rules for photography – ‘the rule of thirds’, correct exposure, capturing your subject in sharp focus. But as much as I adhere to these rules, I also encourage myself to break them – as many of the most iconic photographers of our time have successfully done.

The same can be said for advertising. A quick Google search will offer thousands of articles on the ‘golden rules of advertising’ – branding within the first 3 seconds, differentiate from the competition, include a call to action. But there are countless examples of successful ads that buck all the rules. Cadbury’s Gorilla anyone? Because the truth is whilst those ‘rules’ can be useful guidelines, they should be regarded as nothing more sacred than that.

Put an original twist on something unoriginal

Sure, I might be taking a photo of something that’s been captured thousands of times before. But I’ll always ask myself how I can put a unique spin on it. Maybe it’s the angles, the position of the sun or the clouds, or focusing on a specific feature. It’s the same in advertising. We’re so obsessed with finding something original – be it a ‘USP’ or a never-thought-of-before insight – that we often ignore a great idea that’s in plain sight. Maybe the insight is unoriginal or the product is undifferentiated, but, as Byron Sharp teaches us, that doesn’t mean you can’t have a distinctive piece of work. The message or subject might be unoriginal, but can you land it in an original way? After all, it’s not always what you say, it can be the way you say it.

Don’t be afraid to edit to fit your vision

You know when you’ve got a great end product in mind, but you’re not quite sure how to get there? In photography, it’s called photo editing. In advertising, it’s post-rationalisation. Purists in both fields like to respect the process – which means no tampering with the photo in photography and no post-creative manipulation of the strategy in advertising. My advice? Fuck the purists! If the objective is to achieve the most engaging end result then who is to dictate what the process should be to get there? If the ad works, does it really matter what the strategy was that got it there?