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It’s always the lighting that first catches Diane Lacy’s eye when she takes a photograph. In one of her images, it is a quiet blue light shining on a lone cowboy as he rides through Wild Rose Pass at daybreak. In another image, it is a dust-scattered white glow surrounding a pair of horses at play. In another, it’s a radiant blond light illuminating a dark trail of cattle across a high-desert pasture.

“It’s almost like He gets my attention that way,” Diane says.

Like a heavenly spotlight, the light guides her to notice and capture her experiences on the Kokernot o6 ranch. The 57-year-old mother, grandmother and award-winning photographer has lived and worked with her husband Chris for 35 years on the family ranch, which stretches between Fort Davis and Alpine. Her pockets stuffed with cameras, she rides among the cowboys and cattle across the 200-section spread, looking for light and moments that express the relationships in her world.

“There are spectacular moments every day if you look for them,” she says.

Capturing moments and relationships are of paramount importance to Diane, whether she’s photographing a wedding, a group of children, her travels around the world, a family reunion or life on the ranch.

“Any kind of drama, anything that shows the beauty of God’s creation, is a thrill to me, and so wherever I find it, I try to capture it,” she says.

To capture her unique experiences on the Kokernot o6 ranch, she has to act quickly.

The perspective in her ranch images is usually a few feet above eye level; she snaps most of her photographs while riding horseback. Equipment doesn’t interest her; sometimes she uses a disposable camera if that’s all she can find in her leggings pocket. When people ask her what lens, what camera or what film she uses, she tells them she doesn’t know.

“Whatever I have with me at the time, I just want to capture the moment. I don’t care what I’m using,” she says. “Usually these things only last a split second. The light changes, the action changes, and it’s gone.”

Having worked on the ranch for decades, she can anticipate these instants. She can predict what the animals and cowboys are about to do, and she’s there with them, ready to catch moments when they happen.

That intuitive understanding of ranch life is part of what makes her western photography so unique. Her images convey the special relationships between cattle, horses, cowboys and the ranch environment, as well as her own relationship with her world – her appreciation of the animals and open spaces, and her love of her family’s way of life.

 

Family photographs line the front hallway of the Lacy home on the Kokernot o6 ranch north of Fort Davis. In one aged black and white portrait, a little towheaded girl in cowgirl costume sits comfortably on a paint horse. Next to her portrait, under the same divided-matte frame, a little boy in cowboy attire rides a similar paint horse. Both children smile with an easy and subtle confidence that shows they are in their element.

The girl is Diane on her horse Lightning. The boy is Chris on his horse Sailor. Long before their paths crossed as college students, Diane and Chris shared a parallel dream.

“All my life I loved ranching,” Diane says, her light eyes – still framed by shoulder-length blonde hair – reflecting the earnestness and poise of her childhood portrait. “That was what I always wanted to do, live on a ranch and be out in the open spaces.”

Diane grew up in San Antonio and went to high school at Alamo Heights. She loved art, dancing, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. She spent her childhood playing cowboys with her brother and riding horses at their grandparents’ ranch outside of San Angelo.

Chris grew up in Waco, where his mother, Mary Ann Kokernot Lacy, moved when she married into the Lacy family. Chris’s summers and holidays were spent with his grandfather, Herbert Lee Kokernot Jr., at the Kokernot o6 ranch.

Older than the state of Texas, the o6 brand was brought westward to the open range of the Trans-Pecos region in the 1880s by brothers John and Lee Kokernot. Lee Kokernot’s son, Herbert Lee Kokernot, took over the cattle operation in the 1900s. Not long after, his son, Herbert Lee Kokernot Jr., succeeded him in managing the sprawling ranch holdings, which at one point totaled 300,000 acres. As Herbert Lee Kokernot Jr.’s grandson, Chris was always poised to someday take over the family spread.

Diane met Chris at Texas Christian University, where she initially wanted to become a doctor, then considered medical illustration and finally decided on studying art. She and Chris dated for awhile before she found out the college football player had plans to run a ranching business. “That was an added bonus,” she says.

The two married and moved to West Texas after Chris completed his ranch management degree and Diane finished her art degree.

When they first arrived at the ranch, Diane remembers being overwhelmed by its vastness, its isolation, its magnificence and the rugged naturalness of the terrain.

She delved into ranch work right away. She would ride out early with Chris on all-day trips to rope cattle and doctor screwworms, stopping to eat canned Vienna sausage and drink from creeks.

Doctoring screwworms was grueling work; to stop the flesh-eating fly larvae from devastating their herd, she and Chris traversed the ranch all day, every day, capturing calves, and cleaning and scraping maggots from any open wounds. It was a challenging way for Diane to learn how to ride.

“My first horse was named Hammer and he pretty much hammered me to death,” she says. “Chris would be on this long trot, and I’d be walking. Then I’d lope up to him and then I’d walk, because it hurt so much to trot. I thought I was going to be permanently damaged from all the trotting.”

But she learned quickly from the “do it or die” work. Before long, she knew how to ride cutting horses and was helping with the other ranch work of building pens and fences, branding cattle, breaking colts, and going out on month-long roundups. “It was the real thing,” she says.

Roundups on the Kokernot o6 are still the real thing. Chris, who manages the ranch for his mother and sisters, operates the ranch in the same way earlier generations did.

Diane says the tradition continues because it’s practical.

“When you have a ranch that’s not broken up by fences and it’s all open space, it’s more practical to work the cattle in the traditional manner because of the vastness,” she says.

During roundups, a group of 16 cowboys camp out in teepees for three to four weeks while they brand and mark calves in the spring and ship calves in the fall. They ride horseback and eat from a chuck wagon.

“There aren’t many ranches that operate the way we do,” Diane says. “There’s a lot of ranches that have cowboys and horses and cattle, but they go back to a central spot and may not camp out. There’s very few that campout and take the chuck wagon with them. That’s pretty unique.”

Diane learned all about the ranch’s operation, in part so she could help Chris with the work but also so she could pass the family tradition on to their children.

“When I had children, I had to train them,” she says. “I home-schooled them so they would be able to be out on roundups and not miss out on the experience. Ever since they were little, they’d come out and stay in the teepee tents with us.”

Diane tried to instill in their two children, Kristin and Lance, a sense of appreciation for their family, their way of life and their world. She taught them everything she learned when she started at the ranch – how to ride, how to work cattle, how to read the animals.

“Now they’re grown and they’re teaching their children how to do it,” she says.

The knowledge Diane has cultivated through ranching also enriches her photography.

Learning to read cattle and horses, she can understand their behavior and anticipate what they’re going to do. It’s a necessary skill when driving cattle on a long cattle drive or catching a runaway calf. But predicting their behavior also helps her catch incredible moments with them on film.

“I’m not like most photographers that will go and set up with a tripod, study the situation, wait for the light and then stage the action,” she says. “If you try to stage any of this with animals or people, I’ve found that they become self-conscious.”

“Everything I do is candid. It’s caught at that moment,” she continues. “I don’t wait, I just catch it. And the only way you can catch it is to anticipate it.”

She points to her photograph, Horse Play, as an example.

In the image, two horses rear up in a playful embrace among a mulling herd, their hooves surrounded by a haze of dust. First light warms a distant mountain pasture in the background, while the horses in the foreground are bathed in cool dawn shadows.

Diane says it was very early and very cold when they gathered the herd of young horses from the distant pasture.

“We were bringing them in as a herd, and they were just bucking and kicking and snorting and having a great time. I knew there was going to be a lot of play,” she says. “I was up on my horse and sure enough they started playing, just like I thought they would. I knew before they were going to do it.”

“Because I’m out there with them, and I know when they might do it, I can catch it,” she says.

Understanding the animals so well makes her sensitive to their relationships. That sensitivity is important for her when working cattle, as well as taking photographs.

Early on she discovered cutting a herd of cattle was her favorite activity on the ranch.

“It’s an art to me,” she says. “It’s satisfying when you get it done right.”

Pairing up cattle and gracefully separating the pairs from the herd engages Diane’s eye for relationships, the same intuitive vision she uses when composing photographs of any subject.

She looks for relationships between the cattle – perhaps a mother cow who is weaning her calf or a calf who isn’t interested in nursing – and decides carefully how to work them into pairs.

“It’s a thrill to finally get them together and then figure out a way to ease them out of the herd,” she says.

“And if you’re on a good cutting horse, that’s even better,” she continues. “You’re like a team together.”

Diane describes her photograph, Let’s Go To Work, as an example of this. In the image, a cowboy has just caught a cutting horse and holds the horse by a loose rope. The white-shirted man and pale horse stand still and ready against a copper cloud of swirling dust, which offers faint glimpses of a storming remuda of horses in the background.

“The horse knows that he’s the best cutting horse, and he knows he’s going to go out to the herd,” she says. “His head’s up. His ears are forward. He’s so proud he’s been chosen to work. And the cowboy’s looking at him and saying, ‘Okay, ready to go to work?’ It’s that recognition, that acknowledgement between them.”

Capturing these relationships is what motivated Diane to take photographs on the ranch soon after she arrived. On roundups, she would be touched by the relationship between a mother cow and her calf, or a cowboy and his horse. The relationship between bulls with macho attitudes and turf to fight over, or horses running together in a remuda.

“You’re not thinking about anything else. You’re not thinking about going to a party next week, or about what’s going on in the rest of the world. Your whole world is that, the work and the interrelationships,” she says. “I started thinking, ‘I’ve got to express this some way.’ It was just so overwhelming and so magnificent.”

She started by painting and then by taking photographs. One year, at a Texas Ranch Roundup in Wichita Falls, she discovered that people were interested in buying her paintings and photographs. A few years later in 1996, her photography exhibit won first place at the annual event, competing against the likes of Bob Moorehouse. Then her photography won awards at the American Photography Exhibition and was included in the Texas Photographic Society’s Governor Exhibition. It started appearing in magazines and newspapers across the nation. It wasn’t long before she had offers to do solo exhibitions, including one at the Cowboy Artists of America Museum in Kerrville, a rare honor for a woman photographer. Now she exhibits and sells her widely collected photographs on her website, at Apache Trading Post in Alpine and in other Texas galleries.

But Diane didn’t set out to become a renowned western photographer; her voice is modest when she talks about her successes. Her photography is still deeply rooted in her desire to share her experiences and capture the relationships she sees in the world.

“You’ll see a herd of antelope running in front of you. Or you’ll see a big buck over there on the mountain, or you’ll see a baby calf laying there under a bush,” she says. “You wouldn’t want to be alone with that. You want other people to share it with you.”

“I didn’t have a way of describing that to people because they don’t have that experience. They don’t know how to relate to it. So the photography and the artwork is a way to convey that, even though it’s very inadequate.”

By inadequate, she means the full sensory experience can’t be captured in a photograph. She wishes she could also share the smells and sounds of horses trotting across a pasture or bacon sizzling over a campfire. To convey these other dimensions of her experience, she works very hard on coming up with titles that describe the entire scene, such as “I Hear Thunder” or “After the Noon Meal.”

While these titles flesh out the story behind each image, the moments themselves always stand on their own as uniquely beautiful – an old cowboy resting pensively against the side of his cutting horse, a remuda running through lavender dust or a cattle drive set against a West Texas storm.

There is another, more subtle dimension in Diane’s photography that gives them even greater depth. Her images capture her own relationship with her world – the details she appreciates and the way of life she loves.

“I want the viewer to feel like they are part of it,” she says. “I want the viewer to experience it like I’m experiencing it.”

“I guess that’s why I’ve never been very content just taking a photograph – a pretty photograph, sharp as a pin, a photograph where you’ve waited two weeks to catch the light. Most of my photographs are not clear and sharp. They’re not that tripod moment,” she continues. “They’re just trying to let the viewer in on a special moment of action or just a special moment. I’m not particular about what I use or how I use it. I just want to catch it.”

 

Diane Lacy’s photography can be viewed and purchased on her website (www.dianelacy.com), at The Spirit of the West Gallery at the Apache Trading Post in Alpine, the Fort Davis Drug Store, the Comanche Creek Gallery in Lajitas and the The Treasury Gallery near Lake Travis in Austin.

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