PORTFOLIO THREE • Life and Death
In the last quarter century, we have viewed the state with anger, humor, sorrow, and compassion, and these images do the same.
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The verisimilitude of television shows like ER had not yet inured the public to the images that such an environment generates, and many of Patrick Berry’s photos captured the intensity of extreme resuscitation attempts. “The big event was a ‘chest,’” says Berry, referring to the life-saving procedure in which the patient’s chest is cut at the sternum and the rib cage jacked open to expose the heart for surgical repair. “I went to the hospital four times over a three-week period. The staff insisted I come in on an ‘Action Friday,’ their term for a full-moon Friday after payday. Someone called out, ‘Pat, we’ve got a chest coming in.’ There was so much energy. The patient was lying naked on the stretcher, with maybe sixteen people working on him at once, and I was shooting fast. The scene didn’t bother me at the time, because I was so busy.”
The photo of the empty room was taken almost inadvertently. Says Berry: “I was just walking down the hall, and I glanced at the shock room. Just fifteen minutes before, the room was full of people.” He had to act fast: “The rooms have to be cleaned up quickly for the next patient.” Though taken in the aftermath of surgery, the picture is still full of energy—the calm after a just-dissipated storm. Chester Rosson
No.95
Father and Invalid Son by Doug Milner
Arlington, “Mad at the World” September 1990
TRAGEDY PROMPTED THIS UNFLINCHING PHOTOGRAPH, and tragedy has followed in its wake. Johnathan Brasfield, the child in the foreground, died in 1993. And Doug Milner, the gifted photographer who took the picture, died in 1995 of an allergic reaction to a wasp sting. As a result, one can only conjecture what Milner hoped to convey when he set up the picture in the Brasfield family’s Arlington home. It would probably be fair to say, though, that the deliberate harshness of the lighting emphasizes the fragility of the child, who had suffered severe brain damage from oxygen deprivation a day after surgery. (Johnathan’s insurance company refused to pay for various expenses, and the crusade of his father, Tom Brasfield, to find public assistance inspired the September 1990 feature.) Similarly, the deep shadows accentuate the anger and frustration on the face of Tom, who is quietly holding his son’s left hand just out of sight of the camera. But perhaps above all, the picture expresses the bond between father and son. “It’s been almost five years since Johnathan died,” says Brasfield, “but not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.” Patricia Sharpe
No.96
Man on Swing by Tommy Hultgren
San Antonio, “Injured Parties” November 1992
GEORGE PAOURIS—THE MAN IN THIS lonely and seemingly windswept picture—is now dead, killed by his ex-wife less than three months after the photograph was published. His demise came as the tragic conclusion to a vicious custody battle for the couple’s young daughter, during which Paouris asserted that his former spouse, Dolores Markee, was mentally unstable and she in turn accused him of having sexually molested the child. In late July 1992 the court granted Paouris custody of their daughter. Early the following year, Markee went to Paouris’ San Antonio house, and when he stepped outside to talk to her, she shot him a total of ten times at close range. She is currently serving a 58-year sentence for murder.
“In setting up the picture, I was trying to use the empty swing symbolically,” says San Antonio photographer Tommy Hultgren. “We were at a playground where George often took his daughter on the weekends. I wanted to set a mood and tell a little about the man.” Hultgren employed a wide-angle lens to create a sense of emptiness and isolation. “He was quiet and reserved, not very forthcoming emotionally. The trial had been traumatic for him, and it was hard for him to open up.”
The November 1992 story that the photograph accompanied concerned the growing number of custody cases in which former wives accuse ex-husbands of having sexually abused their children. After the article ran, Hultgren didn’t think much more about it until he read in the paper that Paouris had been killed. “It was pretty disturbing for me,” he says, “because it hadn’t been that long since we took the photograph. He was a nice guy. In fact, I still have a picture of him and my assistant and me that we took next to the swing set just for grins.” Patricia Sharpe
No.97
Coyote in Trap by Wyman Meinzer
Dickens County, “The Coyote Wars” June 1981
EVEN FOR SOMEONE WHO TODAY MAKES his home in the remodeled former city jail of tiny Benjamin, Wyman Meinzer’s youthful rebellion was eccentric. After graduating from Texas Tech University in 1974 with a degree in wildlife management, he spent the next three years in a dugout on North Texas’ Pitchfork Ranch, trapping coyotes to pay for his groceries. The going price was $11 a hide. He was the son of a ranch foreman, and in that culture, coyotes were vermin. Though he loved their quirks and their yodeled serenades, he killed hundreds of them. He was a student of color as well as nature—at night he studied acrylic paint by the light of a Coleman lantern.
That hermitage was the unlikely apprenticeship of an acclaimed conservationist and wildlife photographer whose work has since appeared on more than two hundred magazine covers. His books include Coyote (1995), for which he also wrote the text. Meinzer, who contends that the wild canines’ predation on livestock is “greatly exaggerated,” took the shot of the coyote during his years on the Pitchfork. It ran with my 1981 essay on the cohabitation of coyotes and Texas sheep and goat ranchers, and never was the old saw truer: The picture was worth several thousand words. “I caught that coyote in John Bell Canyon with a number-four steel trap,” he recalls, making no mention of f-stops. “Some would cow down, realizing that it was over, their time was up. But in a moment of hopelessness, this one had an expression of total defiance.” Jan Reid
No.98
Atlantic Green Sea Turtle by James Balog
South Padre Island, “Survivors” February 1991
TEXANS CONSIDER THEMSELVES A RARE BREED, but Coloradan James Balog planned to photograph even rarer creatures when he visited the state in 1988. He was researching a book on endangered wildlife, which he photographed against stylized backgrounds to emphasize the animals’ geographical distance from their native habitats. He found a disproportionate number of vanishing species housed in Texas, at a variety of city zoos, nature preserves, and private ranches. Only one of the seven species—the Atlantic green sea turtle pictured here—was a native. “We were down near South Padre Island,” says Balog, “when someone told us about Ila Loetscher, the Turtle Lady, so we drove over. She was very welcoming and very simpatico with the turtles. In a world of animal obsessives, I had never met anyone as obsessive as she was—and I mean that in a good way.
“We did most of the shots in the water. But as she was handling this particular turtle, I caught a glimpse of the underside: lovely, pale, delicate. I said, ‘God, that is just gorgeous. Can we turn him over on his back?’ She said yes, not for long but for a little while. We got a big piece of fabric and folded it over several times to make a cushion, then placed him on it and stabilized the ridge along his back. The shot took only ten minutes.” Then Loetscher returned the turtle to his tank, and he happily swam away.
Balog notes, however, that many viewers are upset by the animal’s posture. “It wasn’t planned,” he says, “but with that helpless positioning of his arms, this picture is almost a crucifixion scene.” Anne Dingus
No.99
Chocolate-Peanut Butter Bread by Rick Patrick
Austin, State Fare October 1991
THE ASSIGNMENT WAS SIMPLE—TAKE A PICTURE of some chocolate–peanut butter bread—but in the process, the bread became the center of a fully imagined dramatic scenario. Says Austin photographer Rick Patrick: “The food stylist, Megan Bowman, and I came up with the idea of giving the picture a time and a place—Sunday morning in the breakfast room, with light streaming through a window and four or five cups of coffee and all the time in the world to do absolutely nothing.” They used the Sunday comics to imply the day and the strawberries to suggest self-indulgence, but most of all, they manipulated the light. “There’s no natural light in the picture and no window,” Patrick says. “We used a spotlight and a device called a gobo”—short for “go-between”—“modified with a windowpane pattern to create the lines falling on the plate and knife.” They also shone the light through water to make it look wobbly and irregular, as if the room were in some wonderful old house. Part of the satisfaction of food photography, Patrick reflects, is making each picture into a little story: “They’re like chapters out of a life I would like to live myself.” Patricia Sharpe
No.100
Key Lime Pie by Pete McArthur
Los Angeles, State Fare June 1991
WARNING: DO NOT EAT ANYTHING IN THIS PICTURE. The “Key lime” pie is made of sturdy mashed potatoes; it’s also about six inches tall in order to look right when shot at a steep angle. The whipped cream is a chemical-impregnated nondairy topping, and the coffee is soy sauce mixed with soap so its cute little bubbles will last. Talk about shattered illusions—but to Los Angeles’ Pete McArthur, reality is meaningless and art is paramount in still-life photography.
McArthur’s specialty involves not only doing weird things to food (like this dessert from El Paso’s San Francisco Grill) but also maintaining an aesthetic philosophy. “I don’t try to recreate a slice of life,” he says. “I emphasize form. To me, every element in a still life is a shape, and I arrange those shapes without worrying about what they are.” As he envisioned it, this picture wasn’t about pie and coffee; it was about circles: “The pie plate, the saucer, the cup, and the sugar bowl are all circles. We tried to reinforce that and keep the picture appetizing at the same time. To get people excited about a still life, focus on the form. That’s a great reason to take a picture.” Patricia Sharpe
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