In 1971 Grayson Mathews, traveling in his Chevy pickup on the highways and back roads of the American West, began a two-year photographic project to document the lifestyles of professional rodeo cowboys. With his Leicas and Nikon F cameras loaded with Kodak Tri-X and 1,000 ASA speed 2475 Recording Film (fastest black and white film available at the time) he photographed in dusty, sun-baked arenas of small-town fairgrounds and smoky, dimly lit big city auditoriums. Away from the fury of competition, he documented behind the scenes in the lonesome bars, cafes and motels.
In 1971 Mathews earned a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship to work on the project. He was among a group of talented young students of social documentary and fine art photography who studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among teachers who most encouraged him was John Collier, a renowned anthropologist who had photographed for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression.
After working on the rodeo project, he was a freelance professional photographer and teacher at the university level in California, South Carolina and Virginia. Throughout his career his work was widely shown in galleries throughout the United States. One of his landscape series is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Art Museum.
In 2001 he returned to his hometown of Klamath Falls, Oregon to be near his family. In recent years his work included a series of photographs that depicted natural and human transformation of the Klamath Basin landscape. His family recalls that nothing made him happier than to drive the back roads searching for and capturing the perfect photograph.
Grayson Layne Mathews, who was born in Eugene, Oregon, passed away February 2, 2007 at the age of 58. In his memory, his mother, Audrey, and sisters, Wendy and Ciry, and brother, Baron, have donated his archives to Special Collections.
We are grateful to photographer John Bauguess, Grayson Mathews’ friend and colleague, who has assisted in acquiring and arranging the Mathews collection.