Cowboys: Spirit of the West by Anouk Masson Krantz

Piccadilly Gallery May 12 - June 14

Iconic Images Gallery Piccadilly is excited to announce Cowboys: Spirit of the West, an exhibition showcasing the spellbinding work of acclaimed French photographer Anouk Masson Krantz. Running from May 9th to June 14th, this exhibition explores the legendary yet often misunderstood world of the American cowboy through the lens of its greatest modern documenter.

Born in France and now based in New York, Anouk Masson Krantz has spent more than eight years immersing herself in the ranching communities of rural America and beyond. Traversing over 125,000 miles across remote landscapes, she earned the trust and friendship of the individuals who became the subjects of her quietly powerful photographs. Her images document real-life moments free from stereotypes or sensationalism, portraying the cowboy as neither cinematic hero nor tourist cliché, but as a living figure whose daily life is steeped in tradition, hard work, and dignity.

Through carefully composed images marked by open spaces and thoughtful attention to natural light, Krantz invites viewers to pause and reflect, finding quiet beauty in everyday scenes. Taylor Sheridan, creator of Paramount series Yellowstone, has described her work as “wordless poetry… a symphony without strings.”

The exhibition, her first major showing in Europe, will feature a wide selection of Krantz’s dramatic and subtly powerful black-and-white scenes of everyday profundity: cowboys guiding herds across expansive plains, the steadiness of a roper’s sure aim and families and friends gathering after a long day’s labour.

God's Country, 2021 © Anouk Masson Krantz

Welcome, 2021 © Anouk Masson Krantz

“We are overjoyed to host the first major European exhibition of such a singular and dedicated artist,” said Iconic Images Creative Director Carrie Kania. “Anouk Krantz’s images both perfect and develop upon the classic Western aesthetic.”

Iconic Images Gallery Piccadilly, located in London's prestigious St. James’s district, is renowned for showcasing culturally significant photography exhibitions. Iconic Images represents some of the most celebrated photographers worldwide, highlighting images that define historical moments and contemporary perspectives. With Cowboys: Spirit of the West, the gallery continues its mission to introduce London audiences to powerful visual storytelling and to provide an intimate space for art collectors and enthusiasts to engage deeply with the medium of photography.

Each exhibited image will be available as a fine-art print, with a signed selection of Krantz’s acclaimed books available for purchase on-site.

American Rancher, 2018 © Anouk Masson Krantz

Corner Pocket 2021 © Anouk Masson Krantz

About Iconic Images Gallery
Iconic Images owns or represents many of the world’s most renowned photographers, selling fine-art, limited edition prints, creating international touring exhibitions, consigning fine art prints and books to more than 30 galleries worldwide, publishing high-end books and resourcing luxury fashion brand collaborations and editorial image licensing to the world’s leading newspapers, magazines and documentary production companies. Our archives contain historic and iconic images from the frontline of fashion, rock, film, politics and royalty by photographers who were pioneers in their field. The archive includes one of the world’s largest collections of David Bowie and Elton John, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. It covers the universe of fashion photography from the late 1930s to modern day as well as the world of politics from Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy to Nelson Mandela.

Lone Star II, 2018 © Anouk Masson Krantz

American Cowboy, 2021 © Anouk Masson Krantz

About Anouk Masson Krantz
International fine art photographer and author Anouk Masson Krantz was born and raised in France. She moved to the United States in the late 1990s and worked in New York City at Cartier’s North American headquarters. In 2001, she set off on her own to pursue her interest in photography and later studied at the International Center of Photography in NYC.

Anouk has since developed several notable bodies of work, including Wild Horses of Cumberland Island (2017), West: The American Cowboy (2019), American Cowboys (2021), and Ranchland: Wagonhound (2022). Her artwork has been shown across the world and influenced the recent worldwide resurgence of the Western genre in popular culture. Her books have sat atop bestseller lists for photography and have sold in record numbers for an individual artist.

Anouk’s photographs continue to receive international acclaim and are exhibited in public spaces, galleries, and private collections worldwide.

American Bison, 2021 © Anouk Masson Krantz

Todd Hido: Intimate Distance, Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album

By Todd Hido

Publisher : Aperture

2025 | 320 pages

An expanded chronology charting Todd Hido's career, with ten years of new work.

Well known for his photography of landscapes and suburban housing, and for his use of detail and luminous color, acclaimed American photographer Todd Hido casts a distinctly cinematic eye across all that he photographs, digging deep into his memory and imagination for inspiration. Newly revised and expanded, Intimate Distance: Over Thirty Years of Photographs, A Chronological Album includes ten years of new work since the book's first publication, including breathtaking new images from his travels to Iceland, Norway, and Japan, where he brings both a familiar eye and an expansive new vision.

Though Hido has published many smaller monographs of individual bodies of work, this gathers his most iconic images, along with many unpublished works to provide the most complete and comprehensive monograph charting his career. The book is organized chronologically, showing how his series overlap in exciting ways. David Campany introduces the work and looks at the kind of cinematic spectatorship the work demands. And Katya Tylevich muses on the making of each of Hido's major monographs, "The photographs lead as far as human-made roads go. They reach the periphery of utility wires, footprints, and paths already taken." From exterior to interior, surface observations to subconscious investigations, from landscapes to nudes, from America and beyond, this midcareer collection reveals how his unique focus has developed and shifted over time, yet the tension between distance and intimacy remains.

All About Todd Hido

Stephen Shames: A Lifetime in Photography

By Stephen Shames

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2025 | 228 pages

The life’s work of one of the most important photojournalists of our time, covering major events in American history from the 1960s to present

Stephen Shames is an American photojournalist for more than five decades. In his award-winning photo essays, he draws attention to social issues such as child poverty and racism. During his career Shames authored numerous books, among others Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers and Outside the Dream: Child Poverty in America. Kehrer Verlag is now publishing a comprehensive book containing many unpublished photos. Although Shames photographed many diverse subjects including presidents from Kennedy to Obama, activists and visionaries like Martin Luther King or Stephen Hawking, and people from countless cultures, there is a thread connecting his pictures: Shames’ photos of children and families focus on what tears us apart and binds us together: violence and abuse, but also love, hope, and transcendence. The images come from his heart and soul.

Ralph Gibson: Photographs 1960-2024

By Ralph Gibson

Publisher : Taschen

2025 | 552 pages

Travelling widely, Ralph Gibson works primarily in inspired series, associated image reveries in both monochrome and colour, whose titles―The Somnambulist, Déjà-Vu, Days at Sea, and Chiaroscuro―underline the particular poetic sensibility that informs his work. Starting out in 1960 with Dorothea Lange, he made his way to New York in 1967 and was soon considered in the same light as the likes of Larry Clark and Diane Arbus. The photographs and series can of course speak for themselves. But for Gibson there is a philosophy at play behind the image, and in the included short texts he proposes his thesis. Nudes, portraits, still lives, narratives―loyal to his Leica, Gibson ranges between genres and creates new categories of vision. He gets closer to things and meditates on them in a way that only the silence of the image can attempt.Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this book offers the fruit of more than six decades of image-making. From Gibson’s first photographs in San Francisco, Hollywood, and New York in the 1960s right up to the present day, this is the most comprehensive collection of this highly acclaimed photographer.

All About Ralph Gibson

Richard Avedon Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004

By Richard Avedon

Publisher : Phaidon Press

2025 | 208 pages

An unflinching exploration of aging from one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers

For more than half a century, Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of the people he photographed. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through to the twenty-first century, Avedon routinely and audaciously broke the rule of flattering public personalities in his portraits. Instead, he chose to highlight the onslaught of what he called the “avalanche of age,” dramatizing the universal experience of getting older.

Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Immortal is the first book to delve into Avedon’s unflinching representation of aging throughout his career.

This elegant hardcover volume features nearly 100 portraits of cultural luminaries, each printed in striking tritone, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, and Stephen Sondheim, as well as one of Avedon’s last self-portraits. Texts by a star-studded cohort of authors, including Vince Aletti, Adam Gopnik, Paul Roth, and Gaëlle Morel, shed new light on an under-represented element of Avedon’s practice.

Thoughtfully edited and beautifully produced, Immortal testifies emphatically to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality.

Cowboys: Spirit of the West by Anouk Masson Krantz

Piccadilly Gallery May 12 - June 14

More information about the exhibition

Selected Books