Every moment, a story worth sharing

    If you want to understand the sheer magnitude of western grit, you have to look at where a town chooses to put down its roots.

    If you want to understand the true DNA of Rimbey, Alberta, you don’t just look at the dirt—you look at the iron.

    When you stand behind the chutes at a grassroots rodeo, you are looking at a lot more than just eight seconds of adrenaline. You are looking at a century-old legacy, a deep-rooted system designed to keep western heritage alive in the small prairie towns that originally built this province.

    If you spend enough time scrolling through social media, it is easy to get numb to it all. We are constantly fed a stream of highly curated, hollow celebrity culture and viral trends that vanish as fast as they appear. But every once in a while, a creator breaks the mold and reminds you what storytelling is actually supposed to do.

    I am leading this week’s editorial with a handful of images that don't feature bucking horses or bull riders. Instead, they feature a building with no tracks left to serve: the Benalto train station.

    I always try to arrive early when I’m shooting a new town, just to get the lay of the land and see what the community is all about. Yesterday afternoon, driving down the wide streets of Rockyford and looking at those century-old false-front buildings, it gave off that immediate, homey feeling of a place where people actually put down roots.

    Sometimes, the best thing a photographer can do is pull their eyes away from the viewfinder, take a step back, and look at the bigger picture. With a rare open weekend on the rodeo schedule, I had a chance to do exactly that. The brain-dump that follows is a mix of where this studio is at, where it’s going, and the unfiltered reality of the miles we’re putting down.

    A lot of guys will tell you they ride for the adrenaline or the gold buckles. But if you want to know what’s actually keeping a young hand down the road when the weekends go cold and the mud gets deep, you have to look at the hustle outside the arena.

    If you head out looking for Gimlet, Alberta, you’re going to find a lot of pasture, a lot of farmland, and very few houses. You’ll pass the old church barely standing its ground, and right after that, you’ll hit the Gimlet Community Hall and Rodeo Grounds. The community literally kept the bones of the old school and attached the hall to it. It’s a place that refuses to be forgotten.

    If you look at Trochu on a map, it might just look like another dot in rural Alberta. But since a guy named Armand Trochu settled the St. Anne Ranch back in 1903, this town has been the lifeblood of a massive agricultural community.

    If you want to understand the true heartbeat of a rural Alberta town, don’t just look at the dirt in the arena look at the old blue painted bleachers.

Lee J Kemp