Shooting the bull with Michal Venera

Hello,

Michal Venera recently traveled to California’s Central Valley to hang out with a tight-knit group of cattle ranchers—generations of immigrants from the Portuguese Azores Islands—who get together to compete, rodeo-style, in an all-day, all-night marathon of games that pit their prized trained bulls against each other, just as their ancestors have done for centuries back home. Michal, himself an immigrant and a “gentleman rancher” (his studio is a stunning converted barn in the middle of a pastoral, 36-acre sheep ranch near Petaluma), loves to capture stories of people who take pride in preserving old-world ways. And I love sharing them.

Fondly,

Freda