With Memories of Dust, photographer Alex Bex tackles one of the most deep-rooted myths in American culture: the cowboy. The project was born in Texas, his home state, and moves between documentation and personal introspection to investigate the codes of traditional masculinity and the ways it is represented, passed down, and mythologized.

Bex chooses to question the figure of the “strong, silent” man—the Western hero raised on dust and self-reliance, a symbol of a masculine ideal shaped by the media and cinema. In his images, however, the cowboy sheds his armor and becomes human: everyday gestures, toil, vulnerability, and the relationships that bind the men of Texas’s rural communities emerge as fragments of a more complex reality, made of silences but also of fragility.

Retracing the landscapes of his past, Bex rereads Western iconography to reveal its contradictions. Memories of Dust thus becomes a journey into collective and personal memory, a way to question the idea of manhood that has shaped generations of men. His photographs, suspended between romanticism and rawness, portray an America in transformation, where even the cowboy myth can finally reveal itself for what it is: a man among others, crossed by emotions, fears, and a desire for authenticity.