This is a book about change: personal, geologic, and cultural. It is also about people: the tough, the artistic, the practical, the dreamers. About the never dull, occasionally tragic, but often hilarious stories of their lives. I have been traveling to the Big Bend area of Texas for almost half a century, and in that time, as my own perceptions have sharpened, I have seen economic development cover the pristine landscape; I have seen delicate formations eroded by the wind and the rain; and I have felt myself change, physically and mentally. When I first came to what is now Big Bend National Park in 1950, I was a senior in high school on an Easter vacation trip with four friends. During college days I made camping trips to the area to photograph and explore the undeveloped and little-known desert mountains. After my marriage to Alice and my return to Abilene upon graduation from the University of Texas at Austin, I continued my trips to the park and the Trans-Petos area of Texas, bringing our children and our friends with their own small children. Our children have grown and married, and now we are introducing our grandchildren to this incredible area, the last outpost of the Texas legend.
Paralleling my visits to the Trans-Petos region has been my growing interest in photography. I developed my first contact print in my bathroom at twelve years of age. My mother had learned of a man who had a darkroom, and she inquired if I might see him develop a picture. I was taken to his house one evening, and we went to a small darkroom in his garage. He put a negative in his enlarger, and soon I was watching a photograph appear in the developer. It was magic. At the first opportunity my mother secured the necessary chemicals, and I closed the door to my bathroom and, taking one of my mother's negatives, made a contact print. The magic was with me and has never left.
My first real camera was a Kodak 35 that long ago was traded off for a more advanced model. In high school I was a photographer for the school yearbook, and I took a class in photography from Willie Mae Floyd, who gave me the opportunity to work in a real darkroom, instead of the bathroom sink and bathtub.
Sometime during high school I came into the ownership of a 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 press camera. The first photograph I took in the Big Bend was made with that camera at the entrance sign to the park. The black and white negatives and most of the photographs of those high school days have since disappeared, perhaps during the process of moving or in one of my periodic spasms of organization.
My first real instruction in fine art photography came in the 1970s when my older son, David, and I met a Dallas photographer, Chris Regas, who invited us to his home and gave us a weekend course in developing, printing, and print presentation. It was one of the photographic turning points in my life. His were the first world-class images I had ever seen. During those days our local art museum did not show photographs, and the local camera club was composed of amateurs of about my level of experience. With his patient demonstrations I was revitalized and redirected.
In 1978 I followed the example set by many documentary photographers and traveled to New York City to photograph the streets and feelings of America's most famous city. Then I produced my first exhibition and held my first one-man show. Later that year I spent a month in Nepal photographing the mountain villages around the base of Annapurna. Experiencing this still exotic country was another turning point in my life. The strange non-Western culture, the physical experience of hiking ten to fifteen miles a day at elevations of up to 18,000 feet and sampling exotic food such as tsampa kept my body sending distress signals. Psychologically, the isolation from all that was familiar and supportive in my life made a profound difference in how I viewed the world. From that moment on, for me, the world was never the same. Nor were my photographs.
I became less interested in landscapes and began to photograph people and inquire about their situations. I began to read anthropology seriously and to consider myself primarily a documentary photographer, interested in the beauty and uniqueness of people's lives. I also became aware that this richness of human culture is not restricted to exotic locales, and I began to realize that the Big Bend of Texas had an equally interesting collection of strong-willed people who measured their lives by their own standards and who loved the land with frontier independence. I began to photograph them and collect their conversations. I started out with the people that I knew best--#151;Mimi Webb-Miller, Bill Stevens, Hallie Stillwell, Johnny Newell, and others--#151;but the project soon developed a life of its own. I found that I was expanding my friendships and meeting people I would never have otherwise encountered. The richness of this experience is something that will stay with me forever.
Somewhere along the way I began to photograph the land again. I have come to understand how much the land around us affects the landscape of our lives: how seeing a sunrise every morning affects the rest of our day, how walking alone in a desert canyon after a rainstorm, watching the runoff subside, infuses a fresh spirit in the most unfeeling among us. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes noise as auditory chaos and reminds us that unless we live next to a waterfall the countryside is quiet, and that the sounds of nature reduce the tension and anxiety that cities create with their noisy, never-ending commotion. Looking from a solitary one-room adobe toward the circling crown of the Chisos in the evening with the gentle murmur of a desert breeze the only sound establishes without question the accuracy of Tuan's observation.
So here it is: the Texas Big Bend as I have experienced it.
