Never Don't Pay Attention (eBook)

Louise Serpa was a trailblazing woman photographer. The first woman to be sanctioned to shoot photographs inside pro rodeo grounds, she was also a feisty cowgirl with a style all her own. Her work helped make the careers of many cowboys and her story is a classic tale of Western spunk and achievement.

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Louise Larocque Serpa often said she was born ';in the wrong place, to the wrong woman, at the wrong time.' Born in 1925 and growing up in New York society with a mother who was never satisfied with her rather lanky, unpolished daughter, teenager Louise eventually found happiness when she spent a summer on a Wyoming dude ranch scrubbing toilets, waiting tables and wrangling cattle. Later in life, she settled in Tucson, Arizona, where her introduction to photographing rodeos came about after a friend invited her to watch his children participate in a junior rodeo competition. Using a cheap drug-store camera, Louise began photographing youngsters as they bounced and bucked on small sheep and calves, then sold the pictures to proud parents, beginning a career that would span fifty years and take her to the highest pinnacles of rodeo photography. This biography of the legendary rodeo photographer Louise Sherpa, reveals the story of a woman who made her own way in a man's world and who helped shaped the character of rodeo. Interviews with her contemporaries and family and photographs from her family archives add flavor to this lively portrait of a remarkable Western woman.