When Erik Weber was 17 he was offered a job on a cattle ranch in Nevada. Already enroute to an adventurous fishing job in Alaska he passed it up, but the unexplored crossroad to Nevada never left his mind, and the experience of working with cattle and cowboys played with his imagination for the next several decades.
His early photographic endeavors took him instead down city streets, into the clubs and parks of San Francisco where he documented the revolution of a changing society. There his career was launched as his photos began to appear in magazines and on book and album covers such as writer Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America and musicians including Chuck Berry and The Blues Project.
At age 26 travel once again beckoned and he left for a 3 year sojourn in Asia, a journey that deepened his relationship with his camera. Traveling the unbeaten paths of rural India and Japan he immersed himself in the culture and the native people's lives, documenting his journey's every step. Upon his return to the states the resulting photographs were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to much acclaim, and some remain among its permanent collection.
In the ensuing years his resume swelled - (he was the House Photographer at Slim's from '88 to '91, one of the country's most popular music venues where his work is still on permanent display, and shooting album covers, the most well known perhaps being Santana, and Bonnie Raitt with Charles Brown) - but his heart yearned for something else. In a leap of faith he and his wife, a horse crazy gal from Nebraska, became urban escapees.
In 1996 they left the city behind, moving to the mountains of Northern California into a small community nestled in a remote valley within the Sierra Nevada. There he found an area rich with beauty, tradition and history, ripe for documenting. Eventually he befriended the local ranchers and cowboys who still work with cattle in the time honored ways in the art of cutting, roping, and branding. Though he long ago missed the opportunity to be among them horseback, with camera in hand he has come full circle, back to the crossroad, on the path he didn't take those many years ago - into the world of western life and art.
He is a member of CPAI (Cowboy Photographers and Artists International) and his recent work has been exhibited most notably during the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas and at The Calgary Stampede Western Photogallery.
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