PORTFOLIO ONE • Home and Heritage
Most modern Texans are far removed from the land and legend of the West, but as the photos prove, they cherish it still.
(Page 6 of 6)
No.28
Friday Night Football by Geoff Winningham
Taylor, “Football Heroes” September 1979
IT BEGINS IN THE FURNACE OF AUGUST with two-a-days—the wind sprints and the practice jerseys and the sounds of pads hitting blocking dummies and Coach yelling, “Take another lap.” And then comes the day you dress in that crisp game uniform, slip on your helmet, and become something you but not you—a part of the timeless ritual that culminates on the Friday nights of autumn, when you follow the cheerleaders out through the banners onto the green grass of the field, to the rousing fight song played by the band and to the cheers and dreams of your entire town.
At halftime, Coach doesn’t say much, just pats you on the back, but there’s a look in his eye you haven’t seen before. You go out for the second half, and the holes aren’t there: They’re stuffing you at the line of scrimmage, and you’re always one step too late, your cleats slipping in the mud, your outstretched fingers barely missing their big fullback as he breaks into the clear and the wrong side of the stadium bursts into frenzied cheering. And after the game, the cheerleaders’ tears mingle with the rain, and back in the visitors locker room with the cold cement floor, no one looks anyone in the eye, and you pull off that jersey for the last time and drop it in a soggy mess, and the pads are sticking to your skin, and you ache all over, but the biggest hurt is in your heart. And you know you will never do this again.
That moment is what Geoff Winningham captured in the photograph on page 68, one of many in his memorable book Rites of Fall. The players and cheerleaders and drum majors are approaching forty or so now. They have gotten jobs and lost them, married, maybe divorced; some even are dead. They have boys and girls of their own playing beneath those same Friday night lights. Their own games are more than half a lifetime away, but in Geoff’s photograph, the moment is always immediate and always now. “I remember the rain, the game, being in the locker room, but I don’t remember taking this specific picture,” he says. “And then, back in the darkroom, I saw it emerge on the contact sheet, and I thought, ‘There it is.’” William Broyles
No.29
Cheerleading Sisters by Laura Wilson
Mullin, “Twelve Yards and a Cloud of Dust” November 1995
LAURA WILSON PROPOSED OUR NOVEMBER 1995 story on six-man high school football. For several years the Dallas-based photographer had been working in the cattle-ranching country of West Texas, where the freewheeling, high-scoring game thrives. She got hooked on the village spectacle and dispatched to Texas Monthly photos from several towns and teams that grabbed our attention. I spoke up for the assignment.
One phone call confirmed that the piece had a strong story line, and it was event-specific. The hamlet of Mullin had rallied around a team led by a running back billed as the Earl Campbell of six-man football. A local booster, Phil Watts, was using his Brownwood radio station to promote the Bulldogs’ game against Weldon Valley, Colorado, as the “Super Bowl of Six-Man.” His cheerleader daughters were named Tami and Taffy. It was can’t-miss material.
I watched Laura shoot Mullin’s pep rally with solemn thoroughness. During the frantic game, she pressed far too close to the sidelines; I feared we would have to cart her off on a stretcher. But in several shots, including the one of Tami (at right) and Taffy, she juxtaposed elements in unexpected ways that convey the timeless union of a pastime, a locale, and a way of life. Of course, people move on, and girls wield more than pom-poms. A standout tennis player, Taffy now competes for Howard Payne University. Tami, twice an all-district basketball player at Mullin, transferred eleven miles last fall to archrival Zephyr, where she is a junior on a state-ranked team. They’re called the Bulldogs too. Jan Reid
No.30
Kilgore Rangerette by O. Rufus Lovett
Tyler, State of the Art August 1990
O. RUFUS LOVETT GETS A BIG KICK OUT OF photographing the Kilgore Rangerettes. The Longview resident, a photography professor at Kilgore College, has spent almost a decade documenting the school’s nonpareil precision drill team. This 1990 shot of Pauline Arrillaga warming up before a football game in Tyler demonstrates a Rangerette requirement: She must be able to raise her leg high enough to touch the brim of her hat with her boot. Arrillaga’s face is so relaxed, Lovett says with a laugh, that “some people ask me if there are two women in the picture.” Arrillaga herself, now a reporter with the Associated Press in Harlingen, gained a degree of fame for this one frozen instant. “I went back to Kilgore to visit a few years later,” she recalls, “and everyone introduced me as ‘the girl in the Texas Monthly photo.’” Anne Dingus
No.31
Fay Ray in Custom Boots by William Wegman
New York, “Get Along, Little Doggies” December 1989
WILLIAM WEGMAN IS ONE OF THOSE RARE artists who have evolved from avant-garde fixture to pop-culture icon. His crossover success began in the seventies, when he cast a hammy weimaraner named Man Ray (after the twenties-era photographic innovator) in a series of wackily on-the-edge photos and videos. Fay Ray (no relation to Man) had inherited the starring role when she modeled a sampling of some of Texas’ most prestigious cowboy-boot lines in Wegman’s New York studio in 1989. With Scriabin playing in the background—Wegman always shoots to classical music—the artist posed his malleable but somewhat troublesome muse in front of a massive, six-foot-tall Polaroid camera that almost instantly yields 20- by 24-inch prints. “She had the most quirks of any of my dogs,” Wegman says of Fay, who recently died but left a litter of new stars. “I had to work around a lot of her problems. But that’s what gave her a kind of aura, an intensity. She approached her work in a ferocious, serious way. You can’t laugh at her even though she’s doing something kind of silly.”
Shot from the tail end, custom-made French-calfskin boots headed in the wrong direction, Fay Ray might have been ripe for parody, but her direct, soulful gaze—the camera-savvy pooch had a knack for staring into the lens whenever Wegman said, “Ready, Fay”—preserves her dignity. Wegman shot about fifty jumbo Polaroids in the session, but this image stood out at the end of the day. “Something kind of magical happened in that one—I broke some of my usual compositional clichés,” he says. “The really outstanding shots just jump out of nowhere.” Michael Ennis
No.32
Rattlesnake Wrangler by Jim Cammack
Sweetwater, State of the Art April 1992
“THE SWEETWATER JAYCEES HAVE THIS RATTLESNAKE roundup every year in March,” says Jim Cammack, a former East Texas resident who now lives in Bayfield, Colorado. “They sell the skins, the rattles, and the meat and use the venom for research and to make antivenin. I’d been there before and felt like there was more to it than what I saw the first time around, so I went back to the 1991 roundup with my camera. “What’s going on in the photo is that a snake handler is milking the venom. He would put a really big snake between his legs so it wouldn’t wiggle so much. Of course, he had a good grip on its head. I stood around the pit for quite a while looking at the situation, thinking, ‘There’s something here,’ before I realized my shot is behind the guy. I just thought it was a strange perspective.” Joe Nick Patoski
No.33
Small-Town Rodeo Cowboys by Mary Ellen Mark
Boerne, “Rodeo, Texas, USA” March 1992
IN THE SUMMER OF 1991 TEXAS MONTHLY invited internationally celebrated photographer Mary Ellen Mark to chronicle small-town Texas rodeo life. Mark, a New Yorker, has long been fascinated with photographing small-scale, family-run circuses all over the world, and the rodeo—with its pageantry, daredevilry, animals, and clowns—is the Texas equivalent. In a single month she traveled to rodeos in a dozen towns, including Big Spring, Boerne, Leakey, Pecos, and Sanderson. Her outsider’s eye helped produce one of the magazine’s most talked-about and controversial photo essays.
Instead of focusing solely on archetypal action scenes—bronc busters and bull riders—she aimed her camera at the crowds who turn out for the rodeos and the townspeople who participate in the attendant parades and sideshows. Some readers criticized Mark for depicting so many grim, solemn-looking people, but what others saw in the photographs was a fierce, unyielding pride. Although in late-twentieth-century Texas, small-town residents have about as much contact with cowboy life as city slickers do, the annual rodeo gives them a chance to celebrate the fading pioneer qualities of independence and individualism. By focusing on the social whirl as well as the arena festivities, Mark captured the heart of a community determined to hold on to its heritage. Skip Hollandsworth
My Library
