Bec Parsons has built an international career around her sensitive negotiations of the ever-elusive space between photographer and muse. Chiefly known for her work in fashion, the photographer’s output radiates with a rare collaborative dynamic. Both her photographs and her subjects share agency and voice; their underpinning is one of connection, subtlety and spontaneity.
Following on from her debut publication, Coney Island, Parsons’ latest book for Perimeter Editions, Lone Dove, takes this collaborative quality to new depths. Shifting her gaze to young model and champion equestrienne Lauren Devaney, Parsons joined Devaney and her family on their biannual pilgrimage from their home in Arizona to the Music Meadows ranch in Westcliffe, Colorado. Spanning summer and winter – fast-paced rodeo competition and lonely ranch work amidst the dramatic Colorado landscape – the series sidles both joy and tragedy, as Parsons’s soft gaze renders Devaney, her wider family, their horses and the uniquely American landscapes their lives occupy.
Flitting between the documentary and the personal, Lone Dove offers an at once intimate and expansive reading of a group of anomalous lives amidst the iconographic American West. In the process, she gently challenges the archetypes of what it means to be a young woman, a model, a horsewoman, a sister and a daughter.
160 pages, 17 x 24 cm, section sewn hardcover with tip-in image, Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).