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BY KAREN BOSSICK Jules Frazier had planned to move to Manhattan to pursue a career as a fashion photographer after graduating with a degree in photography from the Brooks Institute of photography in Santa Barbara, Calif. But, three weeks after she’d sold her car and put a deposit down on a New York apartment, fellow Sun Valley ski bum Sarah Thomas dared her to enter the rodeo queen contest for Hailey’s 1985 Days of the Old West Rodeo in hopes of winning the cash prize. It was the first rodeo Frazier had ever attended, but she quickly learned the horsemanship, public speaking and rodeo terminology aspiring queens were asked to know. And, when it was over, she was wearing the queen’s tiara.
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This photograph was used by Stetson in its marketing.
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“Basically, you’re the marketing arm of the rodeo so you need to know how to ride a horse and talk on a horse,” said Frazier, who grew up showing horses. Frazier’s chance foray into the rodeo arena, after five years of living in Sun Valley, diverted her attention from the fashion runway to the world of horses and cowboys and cowgirls. She began training her lenses on cowboys and cowgirls, in particular rodeo queens. And that led her to capturing Western landscapes, ranches, rodeo contestants, old neon signs and cowboy motels and fading glimpses of the west, including a sagging barn where riders with the Pony Express exchanged steads. She became known as a distinguished fine art photographer and her images ended up in ads for Stetson and Wrangler, in Cowboys & Indians Magazine and in art collections across the nation.
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Jules Frazier discovered this lonely tree near Fairfield.
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She just came out with a five-pound coffee table book, “Faded Icons of the West,” that contains 250 images taken over 40 years and thousands of miles from quiet desert towns to rodeo arenas. And she will be at Saddletree Gallery in The Courtyard in Ketchum from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 8, to discuss images from her “Faded Icons of the West” series and her “Mountain Chic” contemporary take on ski culture. Saddletree Gallery owner Jerry Hadam said he was first drawn to Frazier’s work because of her rodeo images but then became wowed by her landscapes, which include the old Corral Store near Fairfield while it was still open, rock formations in Monument Valley and barb wire and fence posts near Mountain Home. “I admit I’m a little jealous of some of her landscape stuff—the openness, the spareness,” Hadam said. “She even took a photo outside the Lookout Restaurant on top of Baldy that she calls ‘the parking lot.’ She took it when everyone goes into the lodge during midday, and there are skis everywhere and not a person in it. It’s a really cool shot.”
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Jules Frazier shot this photograph of young women celebrating 40th birthday party at the base of Warm Springs on Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain.
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Frazier takes photographs of winter blizzards and old western motels on transparency film using her vintage 4x5 Calumet, 2.25 Hasselblad Nikon and Cannon cameras. She’s dubbed some of the images in her book “Blue Tone,” as she processed them with slide film chemicals for a blue tone in the days before photo shop. “I loved the rodeo fashion because it was so authentic and so back in time. Earlier, they wore polyester western suits. Now, there’s more leather with buckaroo-styled long chaps.” Frazier has taken portraitures of rodeo champs and cowgirls at a rodeo queen reunion. There’s even a cowgirl in watermelon-green colored chaps in front of her yellow and blue home that has to be seen to be believed. Some of Frazier’s photos depict the changing West. There is, for instance, a shot of a cowboy wearing a hooded sweatshirt, a rip in one side, rather than the traditional button-down cowboy shirt. Another photo taken at the Pendleton rodeo in 1988 shows solid white across the grandstand, thanks to cowboys wearing white shirts and white straw hats.
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Vanishing relics like this are immortalized in Jules Frazier’s collection of photographs.
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That grandstand would be a hodgepodge of color today, she said. Frazier loves vintage, a throwback to her mother’s modeling during the 1960s. One of her photographs, for instance, features a champagne bottle placed in the fur-covered moon boots of a couple decades ago. She posed many of her rodeo queens standing on red, white and blue oil drums and others against curtains that she uses for backdrops. “It’s not about them looking pretty but, rather, authentic,” she said. “Some did barrel racing. And a lot of these girls went on to be sportscasters.”
SADDLETREE WEST Jerry Hadam recently expanded his gallery in The Courtyard, at 360 East Avenue, into former space occupied by Fine Arts photographer James Bourret “I’m calling it Saddle Tree West because it’s to the west of my main space. And we’ve got a bunch of western images in there this summer,” he said. “James was in the space, then he got back into doing architecture more. A feather artist took it over. Then, he had a baby and it was too much for him. Now, with Sun Valley Contemporary moving in across the way, we have four galleries in The Courtyard.”
In addition to Jules Frazier’s works, the gallery also features a variety of other art, including trout paintings by Mike Pepper inspired by the trout at Silver Creek Preserve. Check out the Arapahoe man’s wedding vest while there, too.
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