Burley, Idaho, 2015

‘What is the west?’ asks Rick Bass in the afterword to Peter Kayafas’ The Way West. ‘We think we know – cowboys, Indians, cows, dust, sunsets, rodeos, right? One of the many things that is powerful about these photographs is the cunning yet also unpretentious way in which these are shown to be secondary to the primal power of youth – and youth in a western landscape.’ All photographs: Peter Kayafas. The book Peter Kayafas: The Way West is published by Purple Martin Press

Twin Bridges, Montana, 2014

‘Young people and animals – the currency of the west – continue to produce, almost effortlessly, the same story, or some iteration of it, generation after generation.’

Cripple Creek, Colorado, 2011

‘The west is a place where the myth of innocence can be preserved a bit longer, where time seems to behave a little differently.’

Okmulgee, Oklahoma ,2015

‘In these photographs two dominant elements – youth and animals – are passing through the landscape of the American west. These twinned elements seem lost in a dream that was never quite reality.’

Day County, South Dakota, 2014

‘The light that shines upon these subjects – animals, young people, old people, inanimate structures – is not quite democratic but instead is disproportionately reflective, or shadowed, at any one moment.’

Grand Island, Nebraska, 2010

‘Soon the animals will be consumed, and soon the children will be consumed by adulthood.’

Twin Bridges, Montana, 2014

‘I have a secret, wrote the poet HD, I am alive. Here in the west we exist with a similar secret: we each carry within us an often-thumping joy and despair.’

Waynoka, Oklahoma, 2013

‘One of the most haunting things about this collection is that Kayafas has identified and portrayed subjects who are poised – in some cases, almost huddled – between the human wayposts of joy or despair. Is there greater safety, in that middle? I do not believe so.’

Okmulgee, Oklahoma, 2015

‘In his novel No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy refers to “the fire in the horn” – a nest of sparks carried in a cow or buffalo horn to help facilitate the starting of a campfire whenever the traveller arrives at the destination at the end of each day. A thing that is tended, protected in one’s travels, and is never allowed to go out.’

Wilsall, Montana, 2018

‘We see in the often sleepy-lidded pondering silences of the young people here – the next wave of humanity that will be inhabiting, and shaping, and being shaped by, the west. There is a part of them that is thinking: “What does the future hold?”’

Liberty County, Montana, 2015

‘The world – even in the great west, which we have been told to believe is limitless – is not. It may well be getting smaller; the fences might be tightening up, moving closer.’

Rock Springs, Wyoming, 2015

‘Whether it be in the rituals of the carnival, festival, rodeo, parade, whatever, or the freeform spontaneity more favoured by clumps and clusters of young people, we thirst for play, we hunger for play.’