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PBR Remembers Photographer Chris Elise

By: Andrew Giangola

To meet Chris Elise was to immediately fall in love with the man. And, now, suddenly, tragically, he is gone.

Elise grew up in France, watching cowboy westerns on a black-and-white TV set with his grandfather.

His dream was to come to America and be a cowboy. Elise did just that, using his passion for photography to shoot PBR. And he was very good, as seen in his photographs.

As kindred spirits who were initially strangers in a strange land in the culture of Western sports, I interviewed Elise a few times.

“French was my mother language, so if I drop the pen and pick up the camera, I don’t have the language barrier,” he told me in a hollandaise sauce-dripping accent thicker than you’d imagine from a tourist guide at the Eiffel Tower. “I had always loved sports, so it was an easy way for me to walk into the USA and not have that barrier.”

Chris loved our country, our cowboys, and our sport, which explains his collarbone-to-hip tattoo of J.B. Mauney (“My John Wayne,” he said), and several bulls inked onto his arms.

He was always completely jacked to show those PBR tattoos. And the Waylon Jennings one, too.

Elise recently became a proud American citizen and was baptized. He was living the life of a bourbon-loving, muscle-car aficionado, French Cowboy, happy in his new home in America with his beautiful, vivacious, smart, sassy and talented wife, writer Gigi Levangie.

They had left Los Angeles for a sprawling ranch in Tennessee. LA was starting to feel like another foreign country he’d rather only visit occasionally for work. He belonged with his people, sipping bourbon out on the porch, off to church on Sunday.

Elise was set to be in Fort Worth this weekend, capturing the sport he loved best.

And like everywhere else he toted his camera bag on tour, with his afro exploding to the heavens, French accent, tattoos, natty retro-cool clothes, and fingers dangling with conspicuous silver rings, he was unquestionably the coolest dude in the media room.

And nobody will take offense to that observation.

“Every time I shoot PBR, I get excited,” he said. “I feel being with my grandfather again, when the Western movie started.”

Elise wanted to use his camera instead of a keyboard in America. He thought he’d do better with pictures than words. But he bordered on poetic in describing the objects of his lens.

“PBR is this strange dance, this clash, this fight of a man and an animal,” Elise said. “And that animal is a magnificent beast. There’s a mythology to this bull. They’re beautiful and dangerous. And then you have these cowboys, most of them skinny and tiny, not like football players or UFC fighters. You put them together, the cowboy and the bull, and the chemistry of their dance is completely unique.”

Last year, he and Gigi celebrated his 50th birthday, inviting many PBR friends to the house in Tennessee. Last Saturday night, he passed.

He is said to have appeared at peace, a book on his chest, reading glasses on his face, taking not nearly enough of the sting off an unfair, unfathomable, devastating loss to Gigi, their two boys, and every single human being fortunate enough to have crossed into his effervescent orbit.

May there be muscle cars, bourbon, the music of Waylon Jennings, and bull riding in heaven.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to Angel Horses, a nonprofit organization that provides equine therapy using rescued horses to help veterans, cancer patients, and senior cowboys and cowgirls. For information on supporting Angel Horses in the name of Chris Elise, please go to AngelHorsesMT.org.

© 2023 PBR Inc. All rights reserved.

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