Distinctly Montana Magazine

Damn The Wind © 2012 BARBARA VAN CLEVE, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Lazy K Bar ranch has been in your family since the 1880's. How has the history and heritage of the ranch influenced your work? The history and heritage of the family ranch, the Lazy K Bar Ranch has definitely influenced my photography. Hav- ing known some of my great-grandparents and having heard them and my grandparents talk about the "old days" on the ranch, I quickly developed a strong sense of ranch family heritage and sense of the community, land, and life. I grew up seeing fine teams of horses used to put up hay, to do the harvesting in the fall as well as to feed cattle during the win- ter. There is much to be said for those teams as they didn't get stuck, didn't run out of gas, or have an engine break down. And they were warm! Ironically, you have lived much of your life away from the ranch, teaching in Chicago and exhibiting in Santa Fe. What prompted you to return to Big Timber in 2004? I never think of myself as having lived much of my life away from the ranch because I was always on the ranch every summer for three to four months. As the old saying goes "You can take the girl off the ranch but you can't take the ranch out of the girl." I had to earn a living and no one in my family thought anyone could support herself with art or photography. So I became a teacher but I always was photographing as an avoca- tion. I went to Chicago to earn an M.A so I could teach at the college level. Chicago broadened my horizons and knowledge tremendously, but I knew I did not want to stay and work as a photographer. I needed to be back out West to keep my creative and emotional batteries charged! www.distinctlymontana.com Lady Godiva No. 7 © 2012 BARBARA VAN CLEVE, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I moved to Santa Fe, NM, to find out if I had any real talent as a fine art photogra- pher. That is where I made my national reputation. There was a real community of emerg- ing photographers as well as an established photographic community of such luminaries as Eliot Porter, Paul Caponigro. Beaumont Newhall, Van Deren Coke, Willard Van Dyke, and Bernard Plosseau. They shared and offered advice when asked. Then about 1997 Santa Fe be- gan to grow too rapidly — for me — so it was time to come home. I moved back here in April of 2004 to live full time. Your father, Spike, was a writer, poet, Harvard man and, it seems, a rugged Mon- tanan. What influence was he on your life? He never graduated from Harvard because he feared that if he went back East to finish college he might lose Barbara, my mother to-be. Mother was raised in Harlowton, the daughter of the only banker, a handsome Norwegian. Dad insisted that I learn the value of a liberal arts education and that I get one, which I did. We all read after dinner as he had a wonder- ful library and we did not have a TV on the ranch. He was a great storyteller and enjoyed people immensely. 37

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