Rodeo's Grande Dame

Out her stories tumble, like cowboys off a bronc: tales of bucking horses and chest-deep mud, of calf-riding kids bursting from chutes like miniature hellions, of rodeo’s royalty and all those magical honky-tonk nights. 

More tales spill from exquisite photographs filling Louise Serpa’s home on a onetime ranch now swallowed up by Tucson. As rodeo’s first woman photographer, she spent decades portraying this American tradition in all its grace and beauty and muscle and sweat. Her images are gorgeous thrillers, brilliantly rendered in taut black and white.

To Serpa, rodeo is life itself. But it’s life laced by deadly risk. Like that time in Boulder City, Nevada, when she crossed paths with one particularly nasty bull. 

“Thank God he didn’t have horns,” she recalls with a chuckle. “He came out of the chute, took one look at me, and made a beeline my way. I was trying to get up the fence, but there was a cattle truck full of cowboys parked there, so there was no place to go.”

When the bull tossed her into the air, she says, “I thought, Is this all there is to it? But when I came down inside the ring, he started after me. I went into a curl because I’d just bought a new Leica camera, and didn’t want him to hurt it.”

Forcing a hoof inside her curl, the bull snapped ribs and split her sternum before bareback riders lured the animal away. Then a cowboy hollered, “Did you get his picture, Louise, or do you want us to run it through again?”  

She kept her cool. If she had cried or made a fuss, they would never have let her near another arena. “So I finished shooting the bull ride,” she says. “I went to the hospital — and then I fell apart.”

Rodeo has little use for bellyachers. Nor is Louise Serpa much for moping over war wounds. After all, nobody promised her a rose garden back in 1963, when she earned her Rodeo Cowboys Association card through sheer grit and an eye for action. In those days, the RCA hadn’t yet tacked “professional” to its name, and most little ladies were firmly kept to the side. Even Serpa ate plenty of crow before they let her shoot from inside the arena.

“I wasn’t trying to prove anything,” she says. “Rodeo was being billed as the world’s most dangerous sport, which it was in some ways. I just didn’t feel that a woman should be in the ring. So I started from the side. In fact, I backpedaled quite a bit with the RCA in the beginning.”
 

But soon she was inside the fence, and shaping her signature style. Working beside the chutes, just a whisper from the action, conferred an intimate intensity to her photographs, elevating them into fine art. These days, Serpa is acclaimed in the arena and in galleries and museum exhibits. She’s ranked among the top Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association-sanctioned photographers ever. Her images have appeared in magazines across the planet, and by the 1980s, she’d already achieved that nexus of celebrity — a profile in People magazine. In 1994, Rodeo, a book of her photographs with text by Larry McMurtry, was published by the prestigious Aperture Press. 

Meanwhile, generations of ropers and riders have passed through her lens. And although she’s a legend, some rodeo newcomers don’t always know her face. “A lot of those young guys probably wondered who that old lady out there was,” she says. Never mind that this “old lady” photographed their fathers 20 years back, or that some of those images, like Skeeter in the Dust, are now classics.

Serpa’s story is also classic, kind of Horatio Alger in reverse. She was born into New York’s social set, where young ladies were to be refined and delicate. But she tasted the brawny West at age 9, traveling to Nevada so her mother could get a quick divorce. They decamped to the scruffy hills near Virginia City. 

“We were just on a dusty little dude ranch,” she says, “but I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Number one, I was allowed to get dirty. And number two, I was allowed to ride horses as much as I wanted.” In short, she’d found home. 

By the summer of 1943, she was working in wide-open Wyoming. “A friend from high school had a grandfather who owned the Valley Ranch in Cody,” she says. “It was during the war, and he was having a hard time running the dude ranch —the kitchen and everything —by himself. We worked at that ranch for six weeks, washing johns and waiting on tables. I knew how to ride pretty well, so I also wrangled for dudes.”

That’s also where she first found true love. A writer-turned-cowboy, Lex Connelly was another Easterner in flight. “When he told me he was going into rodeo, I thought, What nonsense, what a waste of time,” she says. “I thought he should finish
college, learn to write and do all the things he was going to do. I told him to forget about rodeo.”

By fall, Connelly was fighting overseas and Serpa was studying music at Vassar College. But whenever she heard about a rodeo in New York, she’d bribe her way out of the dorm, catching a two-hour train to Madison Square Garden. There, she’d always find Connelly’s pals. 

“We’d be riding horses through the chutes in back, just messing around and having a blast,” she recalls. “I’d do my homework on the train, and get back to my hall at 2 o’clock in the morning. The only reason I got away with it was because the night watchman at my hall came from Wyoming. If I’d bring him day sheets from the rodeo, he wouldn’t say anything.”
 

Although her romance with the cowboy turned star-crossed, Serpa’s brush with rodeo did not. After a brief marriage to a Yale graduate to make her family happy, she headed West again. She met Gordon “Tex” Serpa in Nevada in 1952. They married the following year and eventually bought their own spread in Oregon’s Rogue Valley. While there, Gordon Serpa gained fame for leading the On To Oregon Cavalcade, a wagon train retracing the original Oregon Trail.

By 1960, however, Louise was divorced and living in Tucson on a tight budget with two little girls. That budget snapped when she wrecked her car and one daughter was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Medical bills piled up. “Suddenly, I had to figure out how I was going to make a living with two kids,” she says. 

About that time, Serpa went to a junior rodeo with friends. It was such a hoot — wide-eyed youngsters clinging to calves or roping goats — that she asked to get into the ring and snap photographs with her little $27 camera. “I guess the officials didn’t see where I could do too much damage,” she says. “Then I got the kids’ names. And the secretary was kind enough to give me addresses, so I could write their mothers and fathers and say, ‘I’ve got a picture of Johnny coming out on a calf, and would you like a 5x7 copy for 75 cents?’ ’’

People loved it, and a career was born as she hit the circuit, traveling back roads and visiting languid hamlets. “I’d sleep in the back of my station wagon if there were no motels,” she says. “I’d shoot a junior rodeo on Saturday, and another on Sunday.”

Serpa started making connections, and three years later she’d moved up to the pros. It was a joyous hustle, shooting all day and processing film on the fly. “Many times I have taken duct tape or tinfoil,” she says, “and blacked out a bathroom in a motel and then done the proof sheets overnight, so the guys could look at them the next day.”
 

It was also a moving classroom, as she learned the dynamics of each event. “For instance, there’s only one place to get a good team-roping shot or one place to get a calf-roping shot,” she says. “And each horse has its own different pattern, as far as bucking goes. Bulls, too. One will go to the left, one will go to the right or drop a shoulder. They have certain habits, and if you know your stuff, you’ll be ready instantly when they come out of the chute.”

She also began to work hunter-jumper events, becoming the first woman on the course of England’s Grand National Steeplechase in 1970, and first in the ring of Dublin’s Horse Show. But after a time, rodeo would always tug her home.

Today she pauses, glancing at the saga framed against her walls. Then she grins. “I’d start to get sludgy in my shooting,” she says. “When that happened, I’d always just go back to rodeo.”

The New Yorker magazine wrote of her: “[Serpa’s photographs have] extended what Eadweard Muybridge did with horses in the 1870s, and with the human form in the 1880s. In her own way, Serpa has revolutionized thinking about bodies in motion.”

Over time, rodeo has changed. No longer can a single person command the arena. At the Tucson Rodeo, for example, scores of photographers now jostle for a handful of slots. And no longer do cowboys rumble from town to town in sprawling, chummy caravans. Instead, they fly, often working several competitions over a weekend. “You don’t have that personal feeling so much anymore,” Serpa says.

Then there is the shutterbug’s body, finally rebelling against years of demanding, very physical work. Now in her 80s, Serpa says: “I’m old enough that I don’t think I have any business being in the arena anymore. So I mostly retired from the arena in 2005. It was the first year I hadn’t worked the Tucson Rodeo. 

“That’s also the year they gave me the buckle for ‘Best Photographer of the Year’ for pro rodeo. I said ‘What on earth for? I only went to one rodeo that year!’  

“And they said, ‘Well, it’s about time.’ ”

Time. To Louise Serpa, that’s just space between stories, all told in stunning black and white. 
 

“Skeeter in the Dust” 
Roy “Skeeter” Humble rides a feisty bronc during a dust storm at the 1964 Chandler Junior Rodeo. 
 

“Miscalculation” 
Rodeo rider Clay West attempts to wrestle a steer. (1983)
 

That Ain’t No Bull 
Pam Rogers, then 6 years old, maneuvers her horse around a barrel and kicks up a little dust. In the background, Debbie and Hal Earnhardt watch with interest. (1969)