McClellan notes, “my experience was very urban but very country at the same time. We would hang out in the 5-acre field behind our house and would pick blackberries, catch fireflies. Some real country stuff. We had neighbors who had cows and chickens. Then at the same time, there was gang violence and police were driving up and down the streets. There were 2,000 kids in my high school. It was this mix of city and country living all at once.” Questioning the full scope of these identities and traits is eventually what led to McClellan’s indelible interest in delving further into his self-understanding and the communities around him. The opportunity, as random and serendipitous as it was, revealed itself in an unexpected way: cowboys and the rodeo.

During his childhood, McClellan had attended the American Royal Rodeo with his school choir to sing the National Anthem at the event. While he had already been introduced to rodeo, McClellan had missed a major point of interest that would permanently shift his perspective as an artist and creative. Having established himself as a designer and photographer, he shares, "I never took interest in any of the country stuff that we were doing until 2015. I was already working and living in Portland, when I met filmmaker Charles Perry. He introduced me to his documentary about black cowboys. Later that summer, I went with him to Oklahoma to a rodeo.” Unsure what to expect, McClellan’s eyes were widened by the experience. He immediately felt comfort in the dichotomy of the people that flooded the gates, saying, “I met thousands of black cowboys. Young men with no shirts on and gold chains, riding their horses in basketball shorts. There were old men with perfect Stetsons and pinky rings. Women with braids and acrylic nails. Barrel racing. I kept going back.” Enthralled by what he saw, McClellan would take the excursion back to Oklahoma every year.

Upon one of his returns, McClellan found himself making friends with the cowboys and the attendees. He recalls his first encounter with one of them, someone who has become one of his friends, saying, “Robert Criff offered me a bottle of water. He had a Kansas City hat on and I asked, ‘Where are you from?’ Turned out he lived on the other side of the 5-acre field where my sister and I played. He knew my grandma and we went to the same high school. He explained to me that half of these people come to the rodeo for their big family reunions.” It was after this chance meeting with Criff that McClellan had an “aha moment.” McClellan was being called upon to reconnect with his roots in a way that he hadn’t thought of before. “This is my culture and my people,” he says. “It changed my perception of home away from this urban place of poverty to this place of cowboys and independence. It was an amazing, transformative moment for me. To put it simply and plainly: I was living in Portland. It was very white. So this was an opportunity to be around the culture. Something that was my own.”

Through revisiting his home and learning about the community on the other side of his backyard, McClellan opened himself up to all aspects of the rodeo. At first, McClellan struggled with certain practices of the sport, specifically calf roping. McClellan reflects on his own privilege, checking it at the door, as he realized that this is the reality for a lot of the people in the farming industry. He defers to experiencing it all without judgment. “My work is about the people. I had trouble with calf roping for how brutal and stressful to the animals it seemed. But I had to take a step back. You don’t know what you’re looking at. This is an entirely different culture. This is an expression of rural life that has gone on since slavery. These are practices that happen every day on a working farm. I need to let go of my judgment as a city boy and observe it for what it is.”

With open-mindedness, McClellan was able to see something more powerful and bigger than him. “You have people that are shelling out to give it a shot. Everyone is welcome and supported at the rodeo. They’re really family events. There’s a lot of love and support in the sport that you don’t really see elsewhere.”
Further exploring the inherent camaraderie of the sport, McClellan’s creative mission crystallized. He shares an anecdote about his first meeting with Sticky Haynes, the first of many subjects he would return to and cultivate a close bond with. “We met and Sticky said, ‘You can ride with me.’ He had a two-ton bull in the back of the truck, going nuts. We drove three hours to College Station. While on the road driving, he’s spitting dip in a McDonald’s cup. When we got back to his home, I took pictures inside of his trailer.”

McClellan would develop his project Eight Seconds through this intimate narrative lens. “Sticky told me that there’s a trailer on the property because he was still trying to raise money. His house got torn up by a hurricane. It was then that I thought these are the kind of stories that felt more compelling. It held more depth. As the project went on, I would be visiting the same folks over and over again.”

As McClellan was introduced to other members of this community, he realized a common thread amongst the cowboys and the ranchers: the idea of land and who might own it. “As I moved away from the rodeo events and started going to the places people lived, the land and the dirt they occupied, and ownership came into play. Many of these cowboys didn’t have their own property, boarded their horses, and leased land on a ranch. If you came upon black folks that owned land, it was inherited for years. From when their ancestors were freed as enslaved people, they paid taxes every year and kept their land.” The idea that people did not necessarily possess the land they lived on, but rather were visitors taking care of what had been graciously handed down to them.

Eight Seconds represents friendship and community and what it takes to cultivate those bonds. McClellan is able to evade just “helicoptering in” and merely taking photos. He is forming something deeper and meaningful while redefining the idea of Western history and identity in this particular landscape by way of simply sharing what he sees and telling the stories he observes. While it has been seven years since he began this project and he feels like it might end, McClellan continues to learn something new every time. McClellan’s wife believes that despite the fact that he wants to throw his hat in, McClellan will be doing this until he is 70 years old. With every passing rodeo season, at the helm is a story worth being told, and McClellan rightfully wants to be there.