Artist Statement – John Moses
A band of wild horses on a stretch of our grasslands acts like a stained-glass window, bending and giving color to the light of creation—Chad Hansen, In a Land of Awe: Finding Reverence in the Search for Wild Horses

According to estimates from the Bureau of Land Management, there are more than 50,000 wild horses roaming freely in remote areas of ten western states from Colorado to California. Two years ago, I set out to find and photograph them.

I’ve never been an equestrian but have been fascinated by horses ever since childhood.  The source of my fascination may have been all the TV westerns I watched growing up in the fifties, or my visits to the stalls where my next-door neighbors stabled their horses, or perhaps just simply the inescapable majesty of horses themselves. Whatever the reason, two years ago that fascination was reawakened by images of mustangs popping up on my social media feed.  

Intrigued, I decided that Carson City, Nevada, would be a good base from which to begin my search. Not only is Nevada home to more than half of the mustangs in the West, but sites just east of Carson City had been movie locations for The Misfits, the John Huston film that focused on the cruel roundups of mustangs before the passage of the 1971 Act protecting wild horses and burros on federal land.

Washoe Lake, a few miles north of Carson City and just west of the Virginia Range, turned out to be the perfect introduction to photographing wild horses. For three days straight, my wife, Ruth, and I could find a herd of more than 50 mustangs arriving at the lake in the morning and again in the evening.  The horses seemed accustomed to human presence, though we shared the area with only two other photographers.  

That visit was the first of several other trips to “capture” mustangs. Next was a long drive to the Lower Salt River and Tonto National Forest, near Mesa, Arizona, and a stop on our return drive to the rugged Cerbat Mountains, near Kingman. That was soon followed by a winter visit to Tonopah, Nevada, to find the Stone Cabin Greys of that remote herd management area. 

More recently, I’ve been visiting herds closer to home, in wild horse areas between the Mono Basin and Montgomery Pass in Nevada.  The terrain varies greatly for these bands, from the pine forests surrounding Mono Mills to the wetlands in Adobe Valley and the rocky scrubland of Nevada.  

Overall, this exhibit represents my journeys to seven different wild horse areas. In some, finding mustangs was almost guaranteed, even if only tiny figures on a distant hill.  In other areas, it was a combination of good luck and persistent searching on back roads that brought me face to face with small bands. Each of those encounters with mustangs gave me greater appreciation of their beauty and resilience and a deeper understanding of their complex, social behavior.

If you were to ask my favorite location to photograph mustangs, I would choose the more remote herd management areas. Yes, it is exciting to be in the company of wild horses in the Virginia Range or in Adobe Valley or even by the Salt River—those ranges where mustangs have become accustomed to human visitors, and because of that often approach quite close.  But in places like Stone Cabin Valley or the Cerbat Mountains, where mustangs survive by acute wariness of any perceived threat, where a photographer’s approach must be slow and respectful, each encounter is thrilling and memorable.