You Bet Your Tintype, Buckaroo

ONE fairly reliable way to tell if you are in a part of the country where people still herd cattle for a living is the frequent and unself-conscious use of the word cowboy as a verb.

As in: “Buck got a good scholarship to go to college, but he turned it down. All he wanted to do was cowboy.”

For more than 20 years the photographer Robb Kendrick, a longtime contributor to National Geographic, has traveled around the United States, Canada and northern Mexico visiting just such places, increasingly rare ones where development has been kept at bay and discouraging words seldom are heard, at least on cellphones, which stop working a hundred miles from the nearest tower.

a sixth-generation Texan

He doesn’t need batteries or memory cards or even film for his pictures. Mostly he just needs time, patience and lots of elbow grease.

Still: Cowboys at the Start of the Twenty-First Century

a new collection of 148 tintype portraits published by the University of Texas Press