When the Myth Frays: Reckoning with a Shifting Western Identity
For generations, the American West has occupied a rarefied place in the cultural psyche—a region cast in wide skies, restless cattle, lone silhouettes, and the quiet promise of endless potential. It was a place painted in strokes of independence and heroism, mythologized in dime novels and frontier films. But the landscape behind that dream has begun to disintegrate, slowly, insistently. The ghost towns are more than set pieces; they’re real. The ranches are not booming—they're being abandoned. The land, once deemed boundless, is increasingly encroached upon, dissected by development, and choked by drought.
In his haunting visual chronicle No Fences, Mark McLennan sets out not to resuscitate the myth but to interrogate it. Taken between 2020 and 2023, the black-and-white photographs that populate the book depict not the West as remembered, but the West as it stands—tenuous, weathered, and reaching for relevance in a time of change.
Origins of a Project: Witnessing the Erosion of a Cultural Narrative
Mark McLennan’s No Fences began not as a grand plan, but as a growing unease—an instinct to reconcile two versions of the same geography. Having grown up in the American West and later returning after a decade abroad, McLennan was confronted with a paradox: the land he knew still looked familiar in outline, but its spirit felt altered. Gone was the rough promise of frontier possibility; in its place, a kind of quiet diminishment had settled across the landscape. Yet the iconography of the West—lone cowboys, open ranges, and resilient small towns—continued to hold sway in the national imagination.
What he encountered, however, told a far less triumphant story. Rural communities were fraying, if not entirely emptied out. Family ranches had become unviable, often parceled out or lost due to changing land policies, generational migration, and economic shifts. Where he expected the pulse of a living mythology, he found stillness—sometimes haunting, sometimes peaceful, but always tinged with entropy. The dream of the West hadn’t disappeared, but it had retreated into the haze of memory, living more vividly in books and old movies than in present-day experience.
In many places, evidence of abandonment was subtle but unmistakable—closed schools, rusting irrigation equipment, forgotten rodeo arenas, and motels with their neon signs permanently dimmed. The once-celebrated idea of endless potential had become landlocked by drought, economic fatigue, and the spread of subdivisions. Yet for all this unraveling, the mythos hadn’t entirely vanished. Instead, it hovered like heat mirages above the plains, casting shadows that didn’t always match their source.
McLennan became deeply interested in this disconnect—the liminal space where legend and reality intersect, where imagery persists even as its grounding truth erodes. No Fences is a direct response to that dynamic: not an elegy in the traditional sense, but a meditation on cultural transformation and existential drift. What does it mean to live in a place that has already been mythologized to the point of abstraction? And what remains once that myth begins to dissolve?
Visual Language of Decline: The Symbolism of Light and Shadow
In the vast, open territories of the American West, time often feels like it stretches and folds in strange ways. Days are long, horizons longer, and change arrives with glacial slowness—until it doesn’t. In McLennan’s work, this temporal unease finds expression in light. The West he portrays is not bathed in the golden glow of Western cinema. Instead, it is cloaked in penumbra—dim, drifting light that speaks not of beginnings but of endings.
The decision to lean into darkness wasn’t simply an aesthetic choice—it was a conceptual one. McLennan uses shadow as narrative. Dusk is not just a time of day; it becomes a metaphor for a culture in decline, for a lifestyle slipping into obscurity. As the sun dips below the horizon, familiar shapes are rendered unfamiliar. The details fall away, and all that remains is contour, texture, and mood. It is in this chiaroscuro, this shifting interplay of absence and presence, that McLennan finds his most expressive language.
He notes that there’s a specific moment each evening—just as the last amber light recedes—when the land seems to pause. The outlines of mountains stretch into exaggerated forms across the valley floors, and silence expands. It is in these moments that McLennan often made his most evocative images. They are not dramatic; they are subdued, but they thrum with latent emotion. The absence of clarity becomes part of the composition, inviting viewers to linger, interpret, and imagine.
The individuals who populate these photographs seem to carry that same dusk within themselves. Their gazes are steady but distant, their expressions neither overtly mournful nor hopeful. They do not pose for the camera—they endure it. Wrinkles, weathered skin, and sun-bleached clothing are rendered in monochrome tones that echo the land itself. These are people shaped by hard seasons, their lives intertwined with landscapes that no longer promise what they once did. They appear not as actors in a grand myth, but as witnesses to its slow dissolution.
What makes McLennan’s vision particularly poignant is his refusal to stage redemption. There are no sweeping vistas meant to overwhelm, no golden-hour portraits designed to flatter. Instead, there is restraint. He lets the shadows do the talking. He lets the light pull back, revealing not emptiness but the quiet gravity of spaces that have outlived their narrative. In doing so, McLennan aligns his visual grammar with the emotional arc of the West itself: faded but not forgotten, altered but not erased.
Endurance Over Idealism: Reimagining the Western Identity
One of the subtler, yet more powerful achievements of No Fences lies in how it challenges traditional Western identity—not by dismantling it outright, but by broadening its emotional and historical palette. For decades, the American West has been portrayed as a place where grit and individuality reigned, where opportunity bloomed from dust and where isolation was freedom, not exile. But this binary vision has always excluded certain truths: the toll of rural poverty, the fragility of agricultural economies, and the environmental degradation that turns promise into peril.
McLennan doesn’t preach these themes, but he quietly reveals them. His images of wind-eroded signage, defunct silos, and neglected barns are not merely nostalgic—they’re cautionary. They suggest that the West’s greatest challenge may not be forgetting the past, but in over-relying on a version of it that never fully existed. His work asks: What if the West was never as free as we believed? What if the boundaries—both literal and symbolic—have always been there, just hidden beneath the illusion of infinite space?
Yet even as the visual narrative tracks erosion, there is a subtle insistence on resilience. The people in these images are not relics. They are still very much alive, still working, still trying to preserve something intangible but essential. Their continued presence on the land—despite economic hardship, social isolation, and ecological strain—signals a kind of moral endurance. They do not insist on the myth, but neither do they surrender entirely to the void.
In this way, No Fences becomes a study in redefinition. It proposes a more honest Western identity—one shaped by intergenerational tenacity, cultural ambivalence, and the recognition that living close to the land is not always an act of rebellion, but often an act of necessity. It is a reminder that myth can be reimagined not as a blueprint, but as a question mark.
What Remains in the Wake of the Western Illusion
As McLennan’s project unfurls across the high plains and dust-bitten towns, it slowly but deliberately makes its argument: the American West has never been static, but it is perhaps more vulnerable now than ever. The changes are not always catastrophic; sometimes they are quiet—fewer cattle in the fields, more silence in the streets, more gates where there used to be none. And sometimes, the shift is psychological: a growing awareness that the stories once used to define this place no longer apply with the same conviction.
What remains, then, when those stories unravel? For McLennan, the answer is not emptiness, but a deeper kind of presence—an awareness of the layers that lie beneath the surface of legend. He invites us to look past the cinematic illusions and to confront the raw, exposed contours of the present. In doing so, No Fences becomes both record and reckoning.
This is not just about what has changed. It is about how we see what’s still there. It is about the responsibility of observation—of being honest with what we document, preserve, and imagine. The West may no longer offer the open-ended promise of a previous century, but it still offers something else: a mirror, and a memory. And if we’re willing to face both, perhaps we can begin to craft a new understanding—one rooted not in fantasy, but in fidelity.
Stories in the Silence: Hearing the West Speak Through Its People
In No Fences, Mark McLennan moves beyond the superficial aesthetics of the American West to uncover something far more intimate and pressing: the quiet but profound narratives of the people who still live within its changing boundaries. His work does not shout. Instead, it listens—carefully, respectfully—to voices that often go unheard. It’s in the silence between shutter clicks, in the pauses between sentences, that the weight of contemporary Western life reveals itself.
Through years of travel across forgotten corners of states like Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico, McLennan encountered individuals whose lives are closely tethered to the land, even as that connection becomes increasingly precarious. Cowhands on the edge of retirement, rodeo athletes facing their final seasons, ranchers without heirs, and store owners watching once-thriving towns hollow out—each had a story marked not by victory, but by attrition.
These individuals are not celebrated as icons, but represented as humans—flawed, hopeful, tired, and determined. Their lives reflect the slow erosion of a once-dominant frontier ideal, replaced now with economic instability, shifting generational priorities, and the physical degradation of landscapes shaped by drought, overdevelopment, and extractive industries. McLennan’s portraits offer no easy answers. What they offer instead is dignity—the recognition that perseverance, in the face of obsolescence, is its own quiet form of heroism.
Time and again, McLennan heard the same undercurrent in conversations with his subjects: that they are participants in the final verses of a long cultural ballad. These people are not the future of the West, but its living memory—embodiments of endurance in a region where permanence has always been illusory. The emotional honesty of these encounters lingers in each image, allowing viewers to connect with the subjects not as archetypes, but as individuals wrestling with change.
Reckoning With Displacement and Disillusionment
One of the most poignant patterns emerging from No Fences is the sheer frequency of displacement—both literal and existential. Some subjects had recently lost the land they leased after generations of tenancy, others had sold off property to settle debts or move closer to urban infrastructure. Many recounted how their children had chosen not to return home after leaving for college or trade schools, breaking a generational continuity that once defined rural identity.
The pain of this unraveling is rarely expressed in dramatic terms. Instead, it lives in small gestures: in the wear of denim, in the way hands rest on hips, in the slouch of shoulders heavy with unseen burdens. These visual cues become part of McLennan’s storytelling lexicon, revealing the layered grief of those navigating a vanishing way of life.
Disillusionment here is not born from betrayal, but from the slow realization that the stories passed down through generations may no longer hold true. The land is no longer an inheritance—it’s a liability. Self-reliance, once seen as a virtue, now isolates. Independence has curdled into loneliness. For many, the sense of belonging that once defined their place in the American West has eroded into something more tenuous and fractured.
And yet, the individuals in these portraits continue. They adapt. They hold onto rituals—branding days, community suppers, church socials—not because these acts change anything, but because they affirm a sense of continuity. In this sense, McLennan’s work becomes less about mourning the West and more about documenting how people live inside its slow transformation.
Holding Space Between Reverence and Reality
Creating No Fences demanded a careful balance between visual reverence and narrative integrity. It would have been easy for McLennan to fall into the well-worn grooves of Western romanticism, to capture golden-hour light on weathered barns and call it a day. But instead, he challenged himself to present a more textured, nuanced portrait of a region that has long been flattened into stereotype.
The visual language of No Fences is rooted in contradiction. A stoic rancher may face the camera with unshakable resolve, but on the adjacent page, a photograph of a fire-ravaged forest or rusted grain silo undercuts any lingering notions of frontier glory. These pairings are not incidental—they are the architecture of the project, designed to disrupt and expand the viewer’s understanding.
McLennan consciously resisted the seductive pull of nostalgia. As someone who was born and raised in the West, he was intimately familiar with its emotional charge. But that familiarity also gave him the responsibility to see past illusion. “Love doesn’t mean pretending it isn’t hurting,” he says. This ethos permeates the work. It’s a form of tough love—one that honors the land and its people without absolving the forces that have led them to this moment.
By holding space for both reverence and realism, McLennan reclaims the American West from fantasy and reanchors it in truth. His portraits are not monuments—they are mirrors, showing us what we’ve overlooked or forgotten in our cultural retellings.
The Emotional Topography of a Vanishing World
There is a subtle but significant difference between documenting a place and understanding its emotional topography. McLennan does the latter. In No Fences, the West is not just a setting—it is a character in decline. Its rivers run lower, its soil cracks deeper, its skies stretch wider but feel more hollow. The human figures in this landscape are not just witnesses; they are participants in a shared elegy.
The stillness in McLennan’s frames is not an accident. It’s an invocation of something sacred and unsettled. Silence here is not absence—it is presence, a lingering awareness that something once vital is being slowly obscured. The emotional landscape is shaped not by climax, but by continuity—the slow ticking away of days, the long goodbye of tradition.
In the faces of his subjects, we see the cumulative impact of disconnection. They are still rooted in place, but they know that place is shifting beneath them. Their eyes often carry the expression of people watching history move on without them—not in anger, but in resignation. They understand that the West they inherited is not the West their children will know, if they remain at all.
Yet within that understanding is a profound quietude. These are not images of collapse, but of resilience—of a people and a place refusing to vanish without acknowledgment. In this way, No Fences is not a requiem, but a reckoning. It asks us to look closely at what we've mythologized and decide whether we are willing to see the truth of what remains.
McLennan’s work invites reflection, not resolution. It holds space for discomfort, ambiguity, and grace. It gives voice to those whose lives are no longer central to the American narrative, but whose stories remain essential to its soul.
Discarding the Expected: Editing With Purposeful Restraint
Within No Fences, Mark McLennan’s vision of the contemporary American West is rendered not only through what is seen, but through what has been deliberately omitted. The strength of the work lies in its discipline—an editorial sensibility grounded in refusal. Refusal to indulge nostalgia. Refusal to chase easy symbolism. Refusal to clutter the narrative with images that only serve aesthetic appeal but contribute little to emotional or thematic cohesion.
In the editing phase, McLennan was uncompromising. While traveling thousands of miles and accumulating an extensive archive of exposures, he found himself consistently drawn to restraint over abundance. Dozens of visually appealing frames—some richly textured, others atmospherically striking—were left behind. They lacked what McLennan came to recognize as essential: narrative gravity.
It was not enough that an image be “beautiful.” The American West has long been aestheticized, often to the point of fantasy. For McLennan, to echo that tradition uncritically would be to betray the lived experience of those whose stories populate No Fences. Thus, he turned to a curatorial mindset that prioritized context over spectacle.
Sequencing became a form of storytelling as vital as image-making itself. The order in which the images appeared would define how the viewer moved through the landscape—emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically. Each picture had to carry thematic weight, creating continuity across the work without repetition or sentimentality. This approach reflects McLennan’s deep belief in narrative integrity: every selected frame had to serve the project’s central purpose—capturing the uneasy twilight of a mythologized region facing real decline.
By narrowing his focus and resisting the temptation to include every powerful photograph he captured, McLennan made room for the subtler aspects of the work to emerge. Silence, distance, emptiness—all became active components in the structure of the series. No Fences thrives in its measured pace, its quietude, and its willingness to let absence speak just as loudly as presence.
The Role of Restraint in Building a Coherent Visual Language
Where many creators aim for maximalism, McLennan leaned into minimalism—not as a stylistic gimmick, but as a philosophical stance. He understood that the American West, often reduced to grand landscapes and heroic figures, had already been extensively mythologized. His objective was not to add to that visual folklore, but to interrogate it, peel it back, and ask what was left beneath the surface.
This meant practicing visual restraint at every level. The locations he chose were rarely dramatic in the traditional sense. Many of them were unassuming—dusty roadside motels, barbed wire-lined pastures, crumbling grain elevators under a hazy sky. They were quiet scenes, but they resonated with emotional weight because they pointed to what once was, and what might not return.
Similarly, McLennan’s portraits shunned dramatics. He did not orchestrate elaborate compositions. Instead, he allowed his subjects to dictate the tone, often standing in their natural environment with a stillness that felt almost reverent. These images do not perform; they exist, breathing within the frame. The editorial restraint ensured these portraits were presented without filter or embellishment, allowing their humanity and tension to shine through.
This approach underscores an important truth: storytelling rooted in reality often demands subtraction rather than addition. By removing visual noise, McLennan was able to capture the resonance of a place shaped by legacy, hardship, and quiet endurance. It’s a testament to his belief that clarity of purpose requires creative discipline. And in doing so, No Fences avoids becoming just another visual tribute to a romanticized past—it becomes a cultural artifact in its own right.
Intentional Limitations: A Singular Technical Approach
Equally vital to the coherence of No Fences was McLennan’s technical decision to limit himself to a highly specific workflow. He chose to use a 4x5 large-format camera and exclusively shoot with Ilford black-and-white film—an analog process that demands precision, patience, and an intimate understanding of one’s equipment. The decision wasn’t born of nostalgia for older technologies, but from a commitment to rigor and intentionality.
Each portrait, each landscape, each still moment was captured using the same lens and the same aperture setting. This methodological consistency allowed McLennan to strip away variables and concentrate entirely on composition, texture, light, and meaning. The slowness of the process forced him to move deliberately. There was no automatic focus, no continuous shutter. Each photograph required setup, thought, and often several minutes of stillness before the image could be taken.
This meticulous approach stands in stark contrast to the modern, rapid-fire ethos of digital convenience. By embracing limitations, McLennan created the conditions for deeper observation. Every frame became a decision. Every exposure required commitment. The large-format negatives yielded remarkable tonal range, especially in the shadows—critical for a body of work that thrives on atmospheric tension and quiet melancholy.
His subjects, too, responded differently to the slower rhythm. Many were unfamiliar with large-format film. The setup often initiated conversation, curiosity, and a shared sense of collaboration. The resulting portraits are imbued with an unspoken trust—moments of stillness that feel earned, not captured.
Technical discipline, in this case, became a form of ethical engagement. It removed haste from the equation and replaced it with presence. It allowed McLennan to embed himself within the emotional rhythms of his subjects and surroundings, rather than imposing his own. The consistency in the visual language of No Fences owes as much to this process as it does to editorial choices.
Cohesion Through Constraint: The Creative Freedom of Limitation
Limitation is often viewed as a restriction, but for McLennan, it became the very source of creative freedom. By establishing clear parameters—from equipment to compositional tone—he liberated himself from the pressure of novelty and visual one-upmanship. There was no chasing sunsets, no searching for spectacular frames to validate the journey. Instead, he was able to focus on nuance, on layering meaning through repetition, silence, and space.
This intentional constraint is what makes No Fences feel so cohesive. Whether one is looking at a portrait of a weathered rancher or a deserted feedlot under a leaden sky, the visual tone remains consistent—subtle, direct, and emotionally calibrated. The work doesn’t lurch between moods or aesthetics. It flows. It resonates. It accumulates meaning image by image, like sediment building quietly over time.
Constraint also kept the project rooted in its purpose. McLennan wasn’t chasing variety—he was chasing truth. And that truth, he discovered, wasn’t in sweeping vistas or dramatic gestures, but in the small signs of change, the unspoken griefs, and the subtle gestures of endurance that define rural life in the American West today.
His process became a way of saying: this is enough. The land, the people, the fading symbols—they carry sufficient weight without needing enhancement. In a media landscape saturated with spectacle, McLennan’s refusal to embellish becomes a powerful act of integrity.
Finding the Land’s Voice: More Than Human Stories
In No Fences, Mark McLennan doesn’t simply document people of the American West—he listens to the land itself. While the human portraits initially command attention with their vulnerability and presence, the landscapes anchor the emotional architecture of the project. These terrains are more than backdrops. They are active witnesses to history, erosion, struggle, and survival.
McLennan’s early attempts to capture the land proved more challenging than expected. The surface-level beauty of the West is famously seductive—rolling hills, endless skies, sun-scorched plains—but those features often conceal more than they reveal. He knew from the outset that this work couldn’t lean on the picturesque. “The land had to say something,” he reflected. “It couldn’t just look good.” That challenge meant moving past the postcard versions of the frontier and searching for places that bore the marks of use, abuse, and time.
His lens eventually found those places—not by coincidence, but by sheer determination. He sought out the quiet scars of the modern frontier: abandoned irrigation channels, dry riverbeds lined with broken stone, carcasses of livestock left to decay in the open air, and junked-out vehicles rusting into the earth. These images were less about visual pleasure and more about atmospheric honesty. They tell the story of a landscape in transition—not from wild to settled, but from resource to ruin.
The land in No Fences is weary. It has absorbed the pressure of human ambition and now reflects its consequences. Extraction sites, ghost settlements, deforested slopes, and fire-scorched brushlands provide the visual evidence of the West’s environmental unraveling. McLennan portrays these scenes not with judgment, but with clarity. They are presented as fragments of a larger, unresolved story—a conversation between myth and material truth.
Each image suggests that the land has memory. And that memory, once shaped by motion and vitality, now echoes with stillness. This isn't the vast, boundless terrain promised in railroad ads and Western films. It’s something far more intimate and sobering: a land slowly forgetting the legends told about it, and beginning to speak in a new and more fragile dialect.
Navigating the Unseen: Terrain Beyond the Fence Line
To find these overlooked places, McLennan had to move beyond the roads most people travel. The most telling corners of the West—the ones marked by decay or resilience—are rarely found along the main highways. They live behind gates, deep in forgotten valleys, or tucked behind the ruins of old industries. Gaining access meant not just physical effort, but a willingness to immerse himself in spaces shaped by both isolation and distrust.
Often, his search involved literal trespass—not in a legal sense, but a symbolic one. He crossed barbed wire, scaled rusted gates, and wandered into places that were no longer claimed. These spaces, left to the elements, held a raw narrative potential. Old barns full of brittle hay and empty feedlots still bearing the footprints of animals long gone created scenes thick with memory. These were not abandoned; they were simply exhausted.
McLennan understood that some of the most powerful landscapes were not immediately legible. There were no signs telling him where to go. Instead, he had to follow intuition, patterns of wind, the arc of the sun, and the occasional insight offered by locals. He moved slowly, often on foot, letting the geography reveal itself without rushing to conclusions. It was an act of patience and presence.
In these environments, every detail mattered: the curve of a bent windmill, the dark crack of parched earth, the way light filtered through charred tree trunks. These were stories without narrators—spaces that spoke through shape, silence, and shadow. They reminded McLennan, and eventually his viewers, that the West is not simply what we build upon it. It is what remains after we leave.
The Geography of Exclusion: Physical and Cultural Fences
The title No Fences carries a deep irony. As McLennan quickly discovered, fences are ubiquitous across the modern West—not only as physical barriers but as symbols of control, exclusion, and separation. They demarcate private property, protect industry, and fragment land that once existed in collective use. Where the old frontier suggested boundlessness, today’s landscape is hemmed in by ownership, liability, and isolation.
These literal fences often prevented access to the spaces McLennan sought to explore. Miles of barbed wire, locked gates, and “No Trespassing” signs became recurring obstacles. The notion of the open range, once central to Western identity, now exists more in memory than reality. The fences also functioned as metaphor: for the division between generations, between urban and rural values, and between mythology and fact.
Early in the project, McLennan faced resistance from people unsure of his intentions. In many rural communities, especially those that have endured economic and cultural decline, outsiders are often met with skepticism. There’s a deep protectiveness toward the land—not just in ownership, but in emotional significance. People weren’t always eager to let a stranger document what they feared might be misinterpreted or exploited.
But over time, through repeated visits, transparent intentions, and mutual respect, those boundaries softened. Once McLennan could share a portfolio of completed work, the tone shifted. What had initially been closed doors became conversations, invitations, and collaborations. Gaining access to land became less about permission and more about presence—about being known, trusted, and understood.
This access—earned rather than assumed—allowed McLennan to photograph from a place of sincerity rather than intrusion. It also revealed how access to the landscape often mirrors access to stories. Both require care, patience, and the humility to accept what is offered rather than extract what is desired.
Reading the Land as Testimony
Through McLennan’s lens, the West is presented not as a fixed identity, but as a palimpsest—a layered record of past intentions and present consequences. The land is not static. It responds. It absorbs. It endures. And in that endurance, it speaks volumes. Each frame in No Fences is a testimony to this evolving relationship between land and culture, memory and movement.
In one image, an overgrown ditch runs through a pasture, hinting at a failed irrigation plan now long forgotten. In another, an oil pump jack sits dormant, a rusted remnant of boom times passed. These scenes aren’t dramatic, but they are precise. They point to the slow accumulation of decisions—some rooted in survival, others in ambition—that now shape the fate of the terrain.
What McLennan ultimately captures is the silence between shifts. The pause between what the land was and what it might become. His landscapes are not static compositions; they are fields of meaning, filled with subtle traces of human interaction. Broken fencing, half-standing barns, trees blackened by wildfire—each element is part of a larger narrative, one that continues even after the viewer has turned the page.
In No Fences, the land is never just scenery. It’s an actor, a narrator, a keeper of secrets. Its textures and forms tell a story that words cannot fully articulate. And perhaps that is the point. In choosing to highlight landscapes as deeply as he highlights faces, McLennan affirms the idea that place is identity—that to understand the people of the modern West, one must also understand the terrain that shapes them.
The Literary Echo: Drawing from Frontier Voices
In shaping the emotional atmosphere of No Fences, McLennan drew deep inspiration from the writing of early settlers and cowboy poets. Contrary to popular belief, many of these texts do not celebrate conquest or adventure. Instead, they chronicle hardship, isolation, and the slow imposition of boundaries.
“Even in the 19th century,” McLennan says, “there was this feeling that the best part of the West had already been lost.” The arrival of barbed wire, the privatization of land, and the enclosure of the open range were seen as signs of ending rather than progress.
This historic melancholy permeates McLennan’s imagery. His work does not merely mourn what’s vanishing—it reflects on how long it’s been disappearing.
Coming Home to Something Unfamiliar
After more than a decade away, McLennan returned to the American West to find it reshaped. What once was open range is now often indistinguishable suburban sprawl. Prairie vistas have been replaced by shopping centers. The encroachment of development—silent, steady, and sanctioned—felt more tragic than any ruin.
“I knew things would have changed,” he says. “But I wasn’t prepared for how aggressively the land had been carved up.”
In this sense, No Fences becomes more than a visual document—it’s a cultural reckoning. It asks not only what has been lost, but what, if anything, we are doing to protect what remains.
Guidance for Emerging Voices: Crafting Projects That Matter
For creatives looking to tell their own stories of place and transformation, McLennan offers a mix of practical and philosophical advice. First and foremost: go further. “The best frame is always one hill farther than you planned to walk. You have to chase it.”
He also emphasizes preparation and mobility—especially when using large-format gear. “Make it as easy as possible to get the camera out. Otherwise, the moment will pass and you’ll drive on.”
But most importantly, he urges authenticity. “Trust your instincts. Don’t photograph what people expect to see—photograph what they need to see.”
Final Thoughts:
Mark McLennan’s No Fences is more than a photographic collection—it is a reflective and unflinching examination of a region caught between past and present. In many ways, it feels less like a book and more like a quiet conversation with a place that can no longer speak for itself. Through dim light, raw faces, and barren stretches of land, McLennan gives voice to an American West that is not just transforming—it is fading.
The power of No Fences lies in its refusal to provide comfort. It resists the urge to romanticize, to glorify, or to simplify. Instead, it bears witness. It accepts the complexities of a land shaped by conquest, extraction, resilience, and erasure. It tells the story of a people who have not only endured the weight of myth but who now must grapple with the weight of absence—of traditions slipping away, of family legacies no longer sustainable, of wide-open spaces becoming fenced-off futures.
There is both sorrow and dignity in McLennan’s work. His subjects, both human and geographic, are not relics of a forgotten past but emblems of a living culture approaching its own quiet reckoning. The emotional restraint in his photography does not dull the impact—it sharpens it. Viewers are invited to pause, to look again, and to consider what the American West truly represents today. Is it still a frontier, or has it become something else entirely—a memory dressed in denim?
As the book asks, what remains once the dream is gone? And who gets to decide which stories endure?
McLennan doesn’t pretend to have the answers. Instead, he offers images that ask better questions—questions about heritage, land, community, and survival. In doing so, No Fences becomes not just a farewell to the old West, but a call to bear witness to its present and reflect honestly on its future.
In a time when speed and spectacle often define visual culture, McLennan’s deliberate, meditative work reminds us of the importance of stillness—and of seeing clearly before the light is gone for good.
