I grew up in a small neighborhood in Southside, wedged between Richmond City proper and the ribbon of Jeff Davis Turnpike unspooling towards Chester. The pike was a few blocks from the corner where our one-story ranch house sat, near Hopkins Road and Meadowdale Boulevard. As a teenager, I spent half my nights barreling north up Jeff Davis until it became Belvidere, a main artery slicing through the city near campus, to catch punk shows at Twisters and loiter on bus stop benches, and the other half drinking Boone’s apple wine at Dutch Gap and smoking pot in strangers’ fields down Iron Bridge Road. We went to house shows in the city and trespassed at an old rock quarry in the woods to go swimming in its wide mouth. split between town and country.
Me at the rock quarry off Beach Road, 1998 or 1999.
When I look at my father, this duality makes sense. It was my dad who brought us to Southside—where he’d also grown up—first around Broad Rock and Southside Plaza before we later settled in the rancher for about fifteen years between 1986 and 2000, when I was five to nineteen years old.
My father was a collection of dualities. Elegant and rough, generous but a thief, kind yet brutal—it’s not a stretch to picture him at home in two places at once.
My father Steve Armstrong, back row, fourth from left, in sunglasses and a white tank top.
When we were kids, Dad took my brother and me to run wild on his friend Ralph’s property, butted against a thick stand of woods on one side and a daycare on the other. We loved the woods for the rope swing hanging dangerously over a shallow ravine inside, and we loved the daycare because it never, ever seemed to be in operation, the rickety playground all ours. The land between was littered with broken-down bumper cars, a garage of old arcade games, a giant Big Boy from Big Boy’s Burgers, the enormous pompadoured mascot holding aloft a plastic cheeseburger, Ralph’s antiques hoard cracking under the high summer sun.
He took us to his friend John Sheehan’s lake full of child-sized lily pads, and to see his cousin Sandy’s horses. My childhood was largely spent outdoors, covered in mud and bug bites. The draw to the city end of the turnpike didn’t come until adolescence, when suddenly neon held more glow for me than fireflies. At the turn of the new millennium, the ranch house fell into foreclosure, and the four of us—my mother, Dad, my brother, and me—crossed the river. My mother had moved out several months earlier and was living with a sister in the city until she could secure an apartment with her Jordanian boyfriend, and my dad headed to the east end of Henrico to a rental near the racetrack. I wound up first with my mom and her boyfriend, and later in the east end with my dad before getting my own apartment in the city, north of the James, where I’ve lived since.
Dad, a rifle, his snakeskin boots. Late 1980s or early 1990s.
My father had a complicated background and wasn’t close to his family. He was raised by his grandmother, a first generation immigrant who’d come to Richmond from England in 1923, and never knew his birth father, so his local family was sparse and largely absent. I didn’t know them well as a child, or later as an adult, but I was close with my mom’s family.
My mother is one of nine siblings, eight of them alive and all of them local to Richmond, with many nieces and nephews—cousins to me—who have now gone on to add to our enormous family themselves. There are many of us, and on this side of the tree, we are Cuban and loud, usually fun, often dramatic. In my 20s and 30s, I gravitated towards the warm, festive atmosphere I found at my mother’s family gatherings. I didn’t give much thought to my father’s estranged side until he became sick with cancer and sold the family river home he’d eventually retired to.
Dad at home on an inlet of the Potomac River, Heathsville, Virginia, 2018
Built from cinderblocks by his adoptive father in the 1950s, the cottage was modest and mildewy, and my father lived there alone on the water for most of the last years of his life. When he became too ill to continue making the frequent two-hour drive to the VA hospital in Richmond required for his care, he moved back to town and sold the river house, leaving most of his belongings behind—including several albums and boxes of old family photos that I quickly snapped up, and now occasionally share on an Instagram page dedicated to them.
Dad as a child, 1950s
These photos, along with immigration documents and other ancestorial archives, shone new light on branches of the family tree I’d all but cut off. Not long after in 2022, my father passed away, the same year I began photographing rodeos.
My dad and I had been close. I’ve often called him the most important person in my life, and believe I was probably the closest person in his. He was a flawed, troubled man, and not an excellent father, except somehow he managed to be one to me. If we’re talking dualities, I am a pretty equal amalgamation of my parents, and there’s no where that’s more apparent than my personal style. I’ve stolen things from both of them, garments and jewelry and ideas, and have been wearing both my mom’s and my dad’s clothing since I was in elementary school.
Me, wearing my father’s vest on Picture Day, seventh grade, 1993-1994
After my father died, I started wearing his leather cowboy hat to rodeos. I’d been to a couple rodeos before, but as I became more invested in documenting them, I paid closer attention to the dress code and always wear boots and a hat. The leather Stetson, molded to my dad’s small head, fits me perfectly and keeps the dust out my hair. In the three years since I photographed my first event, I’ve begun reaching for my cowboy boots daily, no matter my outfit, no matter the weather.
It’s my father’s feet I see when I get dressed. Quickly into my rodeo journey I felt a familiarity in the denim and leather, in the songs about honky-tonks blaring over the arena speakers, in the red clay dust coating the insides of my nostrils. Parking my Tahoe in a wide grass field makes me think of my dad.
Dad in his leather Stetson, which I now wear to photograph rodeos.
Dad in double-denim and his signature boots receiving chemotherapy
I posted some of these images of my father on Instagram recently, reflecting on how the intersection of attending rodeos and my father’s passing has influenced the way I dress. I think a lot of people assume the former is the greater influence—I did start wearing a helluva lot more denim after I caught the rodeo bug. But it’s stuck year-round because it feels like me, because it feels like my dad.
I participated in a grief interview project maybe six or so months after my father died. The interviewer and I talked about the parts of our parents we adopted as ourselves, the things about them we carry with us. I talked about dating and being single, and how if I meet someone that person will never know my dad, and that makes me said.
“But they will know him,” the interviewer said. “Through the parts of you that come from him.”
Here are some images I took of my father, and some rodeo photos taken at the Bulls & Barrels Beach Rodeo, now in its third year at Virginia Beach. These shots are from the first two years, 2023 and 2024, and were also recently shared on Instagram as I look ahead to the 2025 event this Saturday on the oceanfront.
Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.
My father and me, self-portrait, 2018.
Me at the beach rodeo, 2024. Photo by Dylan McMahon.