Photographer Hannah Ladd shares thoughts about her journey, reinvention, and her meaning of la dolce vita.
There is something wonderfully deceptive about a Hannah Ladd photograph. A woman sits impossibly still as a horse sails over a picnic table. Another rides beneath a double rainbow in Montana. Horses tower, women stare back, sunlight cuts across open land. For a second, the whole thing looks too beautiful to have actually happened.
But it did.
“Everything that I do is very real,” says Ladd. The slight disbelief her photographs inspire is not something she wants to correct. It is, in many ways, the point.
Ladd photographs the American West as though it belongs somewhere between a ranch and the pages of Vogue. Her images carry all the familiar codes of Western life — horses, dust, leather, enormous life — horses refuse to stay comfortably inside those conventions. There is fashion in the frame. There is femininity, theatre and a little bit of beautiful absurdity. Most of all, there is a story.
Perhaps that is because Ladd did not arrive at photography through the expected door.
Born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, where horses were simply part of the landscape, Ladd grew up riding English style and spending weekends at the races. She studied music in college, eventually fell into interior design and began photographing the spaces she created. Somewhere along the way, she realized she was more interested in the photograph than the room’s décor.
Then came Nashville.
After moving there following the pandemic, her dear friend Taylor from Breakaway Ranch asked if she would ever photograph people. Ladd’s response was essentially “Absolutely not.” She was terrified. Then she photographed a friend.
After that, “I just never put the camera down.”
What followed was less a reinvention than a strange full circle. The horses of her Kentucky childhood returned, now filtered through years of creative instinct and an enduring fascination with fashion. As a girl, Ladd would run to her local pharmacy every Saturday for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, studying their models, concepts and elaborate visual worlds. Years later, those references quietly found their way onto horseback.
Her work is Western, certainly, but never obediently so.
“I kind of wanted to put my own spin on it,” she says.
That instinct produced the photograph that changed her life. Ladd and a friend drove 15 hours from Nashville to Connecticut with no client waiting and no cheque attached. They simply had an idea they wanted to see exist: a massive horse named Zillow jumping over a picnic table while a group of women sat beneath it.
The horse trained for nearly two months. The actual shoot took roughly 45 minutes.
“And that photo changed my life.”
There is something telling in that story. Ladd made one of her most consequential photographs before anyone asked her to. The image existed because she believed it should.
That spontaneity remains central to her process. Horses, after all, are terrible assistants to a control freak. “I am on the horse’s time,” she says. A planned pose can disappear in a second — weather changes, light moves, and an animal may decide it has an entirely different creative direction in mind.
Ladd just follows.
In Montana, rain threatened a shoot that could not simply be rescheduled. Then a double rainbow appeared. Ladd sent her client out on horseback immediately. She was not even certain she had captured it until she returned home.
These accidents are part of what gives her photographs their pulse. She loves natural light, including the harsh light photographers are often taught to avoid. She describes herself as intuitive rather than technical. The work is prepared for, certainly, but never strangled by the preparation.
Perhaps that is also why in an era increasingly fascinated by artificial intelligence, Ladd remains committed to making things happen in front of her camera. She uses AI-assisted features within the Adobe programs already part of her workflow but generating an entire world from a prompt holds little appeal to her.
Why manufacture the impossible when you can put a horse over a picnic table and photograph it for real?
For all the spectacle, however, Ladd’s work is ultimately about people. She is particularly interested in women and their relationships with horses, and in giving her subjects the feeling that, for one frame at least, they belong inside something extraordinary.
“This is not about me,” she says. “It’s about how I can make people feel.”
Next, Ladd has her eye on Europe and hopes to become more involved with equine rescue organizations, including Nashville’s Cowboy Ranch Rescue. There are more landscapes to enter, more horses to meet and, inevitably, more ideas that sound slightly insane until she makes them beautiful.
Asked to define her dolce vita, Ladd’s answer is almost suspiciously simple. She gets to photograph horses. She gets to meet remarkable people. She gets to create art for a living. Even winning $500 million in the lottery, she insists, would not convince her to do anything else.
Maybe the good life is not always something waiting in the distance. Sometimes you look through the viewfinder and realize you are already in it.
studiorancher.com
@hannahladdcreative
