Barbara Van Cleve, the Montana Ranch Daughter Who Photographed the Cowgirl Life

Who is Barbara Van Cleve?

Barbara Van Cleve is an American photographer known for depicting contemporary Western ranch life, and she comes from a fifth-generation ranching family on the eastern slopes of the Crazy Mountains near Big Timber, Montana. She is the eldest of four children, and her family raised cattle and horses and ran a dude ranch, the Lazy K Bar, that has been in the family since the 1880s.

She is a living person, so this profile covers her public professional record: her photography, books, exhibitions and honors.

A Montana ranch childhood and a first camera

According to her Wikipedia biography, her parents gave her a Brownie box camera when she was eleven. The Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame adds that her interest began with LIFE magazine photographs she studied at the family kitchen table, and that she earned money for film development through ranch odd jobs.

She committed to black-and-white photography partly because color film was expensive, and she has said that she worked from horseback, often at a full gallop. That habit of shooting where the work happens, rather than staging it, runs through her later books.

From professor and agency founder to full-time photographer

Van Cleve did not start as a professional photographer. She attended Duchesne College in Omaha, Nebraska, after turning down a Wellesley scholarship at her grandmother's urging, and later earned a master's degree in English literature from Northwestern University. She taught Victorian literature at DePaul University in Chicago, served as dean of women, and later taught at Loyola University and Mundelein College, where she ran the photography program, for about twenty-five years in all.

Each summer she returned to the Lazy K Bar to run the corral program, photograph and lead pack trips. In 1963 she founded a stock photography agency in Chicago that, by the time she sold it in 1980, represented more than 100 photographers and offered over a million images.

In 1979 she left teaching and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to test whether she could make a living with a camera. A 1985 solo show at a Santa Fe gallery of large framed prints sold nearly everything on the wall and is described as the turning point of her career.

Hard Twist, Pure Quill and the other books

Her books include Roughstock Sonnets (1989), made with cowboy poet Paul Zarzyski, and Hard Twist: Western Ranch Women (1995), which documented working women across the West. Later titles include All This Way for the Short Ride, again with Zarzyski, Holding the Reins: A Ride through Cowgirl Life, and Pure Quill: Photographs by Barbara Van Cleve (2016). One profile says she has published four books while listing five titles, so the exact count is unclear.

Pure Quill earned the Western Heritage Award for Best Photography Book in 2017 and two New Mexico/Arizona Book Co-Op awards in 2016. Her photographs have also appeared in Western Horseman and on magazine covers, and the full exhibition and awards list shows 52 solo exhibitions since 1985.

Honors and recognition

Van Cleve was inducted into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1995. She received the Montana Governor's Arts Award, a Western Heritage Wrangler Award for photography from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, and in 2025 was inducted into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame in its living inductee category, according to the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame.

She divides her year between Santa Fe in winter and Big Timber in summer, where she helps with the family ranch.

For more on women who shaped ranching, see farm.FM's ranching section or a farm.FM story about Montana ranch women.