The Florida Cow Hunter is America's first cowboy, their roots traced back to the Spanish colonization efforts beginning in 1521. CRACKER looks at the previously unheralded workaday lifestyle of these rugged individuals. If you think Florida is all South Beach and Disneyland, look again.
"The faces and moments captured here are a saga of modern cowboy life...the grandeur, grit, adventure and, above all, uncommon devotion to a land that's vanishing faster than I can put down these words...rich and intimate as an epic.'
—Carl Hiaasen, Novelist
"Magnificent and compelling...The strength of these photographs goes far beyond the recording of this little known way of life in Florida."
—J.Andrew Brian, Director, Historical Museum of Southern Florida
"Hands gnarled, skin leathered by year-round sun and a few too many plugs of chewing tobacco, these rough-hewn outdoorsmen resonate in harmony with Florida's natural rhythms. They know the tranquility of solitude in a state growing by nearly a thousand people a day. They savor the exhausted delight, the sore satisfaction yielded by rugged physical labor.
"They are unpretentious, colorful, sometimes earthy to a fault. They are a link to a little-known past. a warning of what Florida could forfeit as it gallops headlong into the future.
"The few outsiders who know of their presence call them cowboys. They call themselves Florida cowhunters or, with pride, 'crackers'."
--Martin Merzer, The Miami Herald
ISBN: 0-9658128-7-1
published: 1998
list price: $39.95
66 duotone photographs
Format: 11.25" x 11.25", hardcover with French folded dust cover, 84 pages. |
Finalist, "Best Art Book", 1999 PMA Benjamin Franklin Awards