“I hope with my book that I can raise awareness and also bring joy to people who just love horses,” said photographer Deborah Kalas about her new tome, Wild Herd: A Vanishing American Treasure. The 160-page coffee table book does exactly that — it’s filled with stunning, intimate pictures of the horses living through the seasons in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP).
Six years ago, Kalas, who had a successful career taking high-end family portraits in the Hamptons, began a project close to her heart — capturing on film the 138 horses that roam TRNP’s 45,000 acres. “It was probably five years of photographing before I decided that I thought I had enough to make a book,” she said. “Initially I probably edited 12,000 photos down to a couple hundred and then narrowed it down from that.” Just over two years ago, Kalas moved to Santa Barbara, where I recently caught up with her over the phone to talk about her book, which Kirkus named one of the top 100 books of 2019.
How did you know where to find the wild horse herds? In 2014, I took a workshop with a photographer, and he introduced me to the park, and there’s what they call a loop road. So you can drive around the road, and at certain times of the year, the bands may be close to the road, and they're easy to find. Other times of the year, you may have to hike into the park. There are trails that you can take: You're following either a park trail or horse trail. Probably some of my most favorite images were made by hiking into the interior of the park.