Exhibition Overview
Contents
+/- 50 photographs
1 documentary film
Dimensions
Various
Public Programming
Photographer available for lectures, talks and guided tours.
Curators
Addie Elliott and Eszti Bakos
Contact Details
info@elliott.gallery
+31 (0)6 85724797
Fee
Please inquire.
In the reservations of South Dakota and Montana, a generation is coming of age between two worlds. Riders of the Buffalo Nations brings together photographs and film by Doug Hancock to explore contemporary youth culture among the Oglala Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Blackfeet Nations — communities navigating the distance between a rich cultural inheritance and the realities of modern reservation life.
At the heart of Doug Hancock's work is the rodeo: an arena where indigenous horsemanship traditions meet modern spectacle, and where the daily contest for survival finds a vivid, physical form. Using rodeo as a sustained metaphor, Hancock's photographs move between intimacy and grandeur, tracing the contours of youth — hopeful and reckless, contemplative and ambitious — without reducing his subjects to the margins their circumstances might suggest.
Commissioned and developed in close collaboration with elders from the First Nations, the work is attuned to questions of cultural identity, marginalisation, generational trauma, and the tension between heritage and modernity. What it ultimately reveals is something less easily categorised: communities whose hearts, Hancock writes, have never hardened.
Riders of the Buffalo Nations offers rich potential for public programming across themes including indigenous histories and contemporary experience, the politics of representation, and the relationship between land, community, and identity.
The exhibition is accompanied by a feature-length documentary film, with a shorter exhibition version available, and a photobook of the same title published by Kerber Publishing (2026).
The photographs were previously exhibited at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a Smithsonian-affiliate museum.
"Photography has given me a way to reconnect with people and pull me out of my World of grief. After the untimely passing of my sister I was drawn to Pine Ridge Reservation where I found peace and purpose as well as new friends. It felt like I was part of something, that I had come home and that we were making something together. It’s impossible to become part of people’s lives and not share in their hopes and dreams. I hope the work reflects this deep respect and affection."
— Doug Hancock
Doug Hancock
Doug Hancock is a British-Dutch photographer and filmmaker whose long-term projects explore identity, heritage, and the intersection of tradition with contemporary life. His photographs have been exhibited at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and the Booth Western Art Museum, both Smithsonian-affiliate institutions. Hancock’s photobook, Riders of the Buffalo Nations, was published by Kerber Verlag in 2026, distributed by DAP Artbooks (US) and ACC Artbooks (UK). His documentary films have screened at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, the American Documentary Film Festival, and the NYC Independent Film Festival, among others.