The bodybuilder: subversive cowboys in the photos of Mohamed Bourouissa

This entry is posted on number 28-29 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until July 15, 2025.

There is no more American and politically incorrect symbol than the cowboy. John Wayne, in Wild pathsimpersonate the racist hero to conquer the West.

Imagine cowboy that are not white and violent alpha males is complicated. Yet, for more than a century, the Philadelphia Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club has offered the opportunity to the African American community, economically and socially disadvantaged, to ride horses, usually removed from a mortadella fate, and learn to become cowboy.

Franco-Algerian photographer Mohamed Bourouissa (Bologna, Mast, until 28/9) created a project around this community, also inventing a Horse Day, Where the knights compete with those who invent the most artistic frame for their steed.

The work of this artist has always focused on problematic realities. His visual stories are essential testimonies not to forget the suburbs of the worldreal incubators of new social identities and predictable but sudden explosions of malaise.

For the young people of Philadelphia, horses, animals that have always been a symbol of aristocracy and power, are instead a tool to strengthen their identity, a way to subvert stereotypes.

Bourouissa overturns the conventional symbolism of the lone knight. Heroes of a minor God with their own buzzy dressed in celebration, force the old hero, violent and convinced that his task is to eliminate any minority that hinders his conquests, to go down to the saddle and go on foot. Objective that, given the Trumpian winds that blow to turn off the fire under the multiethnic crucible, a foundation of American democracy, we can share without fear.

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