title: Revealing Character: Texas Tintypes
author:  Robb Kendrick 
description: Using the cumbersome nineteenth century tintype method, National Geographic photographer Kendrick made a series of faux-antique portraits of some of the men (and one woman) who work as cowboys on Texas ranches today. Unlike Richard Avedon's similarly themed In the American West, this lavish book has no interest in the cultural contradictions inherent in the lives of those who deliberately try to evoke long-vanished and economically marginal ways of life-Kendrick is content to record the cowboys' images as lovingly as they would have themselves. In such an aesthetic, character is not revealed, but worn like chaps or an elaborately groomed mustache. The result is a book whose preening collective narcissism tips it over into the realm of camp. Perhaps sensing this, in his introduction Kendrick writes defensively, "The point of this project has not been to romanticize the cowboy and transport him back to the 19th century, but to document those who carry on the traditions, values and lifestyles that many today would find isolating, lonely or simply too hard." This sheer nonsense compounds the book's fervid glorification of its already self-romanticizing subjects with the implication that they are somehow better than those people who work in office buildings. And in a world where the figure of the Texas "cowboy" has become symbolic for very different reasons, this book-financed by a bank and conceived by an advertising agency-has a political subtext that's hard to ignore.<br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  ##### www.blackmask.com
  
  
  # The Ghost Club: An Unfortunate Episode in the Life of No. 5010
  
  
  ### John Kendrick Bangs
  
  
  This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
    
  Number 5010 was at the time when I received the details of this
  
  
  story from his lips a stalwart man of thirty-eight, swart of hue, of
  
  
  pleasing address, and altogether the last person one would take for a
  
  
  convict serving a term for sneak-thieving. The only outer symptoms of
  
  
  his actual condition were the striped suit he wore, the style and cut
  
  
  of which are still in vogue at Sing Sing prison, and the closely
  
  
  cropped hair, which showed off the distinctly intellectual lines of his
  
  
  head to great advantage. He was engaged in making shoes when I first
  
  
  saw him, and so impressed was I with the contrast between his really
  
  
  refined features and grace of mariner and those of his brutish-looking
  
  
  companions, that I asked my guide who he was, and what were th