On the range with Mr Jim Krantz, the photographer behind the unforgettable images that defined the American West.

A rider, heading off into the horizon, where the sun meets the hardscrabble land – right there is where “The West” begins, and in that moment, that image, begins all of our impossibly romantic imaginings about the tough, inscrutable American men who inhabit it. “That unbroken horizon line is just something that I’ve been wired to appreciate,” says Mr Jim Krantz, photographer of so much of that mythopoetic West. “Omaha, Nebraska, where I grew up, is far from cowboy country. But, the thing about Omaha,” as opposed to the urban canyons of Manhattan, or even the sprawl of his new hometown of Los Angeles, “is that I was familiar with seeing a horizon line.”

In 1992, Mr Krantz began photographing cowboys – real cowboys, he says, “never actors, never models” – in his campaigns for Marlboro and Coors, making images so iconic that they would later be appropriated by the artist Mr Richard Prince, silkscreened on to trucker jackets by Supreme and printed on furniture by Modernica. His pictures – whether for his commercial clients or for his great series The Way Of The West – crackle with drama. Here, lightning flashes over a purple mesa. There, rainbows pour down from a brooding sky about a man riding hard into a storm. And everywhere, horses writhe and prance in balletic activity.

“A landscape is a static thing,” Mr Krantz says, “and different types of elements – wind, dust – add atmosphere, but the energy exuded by the animal and the cowboy really intensifies the landscape. I always try to have atmosphere and action – conflict. And conflict makes emotion. Emotion creates beauty, and that really shows the strengths of these individuals, not only physically, but psychologically. That there’s work to be done, and they’ve got to protect their animals. There’s a lot at stake in these pictures.”

In nearly 30 years spent out on the range, as it were, exposed to the elements and the cowboy lifestyle, Mr Krantz has developed a profound respect for both. “And I will tell you,” he says, “these guys are completely connected to the environment. In so many ways, they’re very, very sensitive to the way the environment operates. And until you’re really around these people, you don’t realise the synchronicity between the man and the land, and the man and the animals, and the animals and the land, in a really beautiful, respectful balance.”