About
8 Seconds

In the dust and thunder of the arena, a rider has 8 seconds to prove their mettle. That moment suspended between chaos and control is where Eight Seconds lives. It is not only the name of this project but the heartbeat of its intention: to capture the fleeting and eternal presence of Black life in the American West.

I first found this story on a hot Oklahoma afternoon. In the grandstands of the Roy LeBlanc Invitational Rodeo, surrounded by barbecue smoke, blues basslines, and kids with braids chasing each other through the dirt, I saw a truth that history books had overlooked: the cowboy was never just white. He was always us too.

What followed was not just a photography project. It was a reclamation. A decade-long pilgrimage into forgotten corners of culture, rodeo arenas and front porches, boot shops and F-150s, trails where dust and dignity rise together. I’ve made portraits, but more than that, I’ve made memory visible.

These images are odes to sweat-slick bronco riders, to bedazzled cowgirls barrel-racing like they’re chasing God, to the echo of Black joy emanating from bleachers and bucking chutes. They vibrate with the textures of resilience: gold teeth and Stetsons, clacking fans and Zydeco dances, grit and grace braided like a child’s hair before a Sunday ride.

Eight Seconds is about speed, but it’s also about stillness. That blink of time becomes sacred. A rider flies, a crowd gasps, a shutter clicks, and a myth breaks open. What I capture isn’t just action, but ceremony. Heritage. A choreography of survival.

The cowboy has always been a symbol of freedom. My work insists that Black folks belong in that symbol that we’ve always been there, reins in hand, boots in stirrups, eyes cast on the wide-open sky.

This project isn’t nostalgia. It’s prophecy. It’s portraiture as witness. It’s an invitation to see what has always been true and to feel it in your bones.