The American West is a wildly fascinating thing. For over a century, art and film has highly romanticized scenes of six shooters and saloons, cowboys and indigenous, and horses galloping through rattlesnake country. For better or worse, grandiose Spaghetti Westerns with cast members falling on a spectrum from good to ugly have shaped how the world thinks of today’s American West. With so much focus on what it once was, the American West of today is often times overlooked. Some people even think it no longer exists.
Photography by Sam Raetz