The Gentle One 
Chasing Shadows
In his first book of photographs, James Evans captures the essence of Big Bend—not just its epic landscapes, but the maverick souls who make West Texas one of the last truly unique places on earth.
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For no reason he can recall, at age 26 he got into his car immediately after the Phillies won the 1980 World Series and turned it south. "I left right from the party in the Philadelphia streets. It's all on one roll of film, guys dancing drunk on the tops of cars and the next picture is on the beach in Galveston." Two weeks of beach bumming later he landed in Corpus Christi, where he rented a darkroom and became friends with Eccles, a young photographer with a stronger sense of direction. When Eccles left for New York and took a job assisting Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibovitz, James stayed in Corpus, envisioning a smaller career shooting weddings and school pictures.
A chance to help Eccles on a portrait Leibovitz was taking of San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros for Vanity Fair, in 1984, finally woke him up. It was his first look at the big leagues, and he didn't see Leibovitz do anything he couldn't do. "Right after that," James said, "I thought I needed to get out of Corpus." Within a few weeks he was assisting Austin commercial photographer Tomás Pantin, learning how to print to Pantin's exacting standards during fourteen-hour days in the darkroom.
James made his first trip to Big Bend in 1986. His heart instantly took to the desert, its vastness, tempo, light, and scattered communities of renegades and frontier people. All that was keeping him in Austin was a studio that wasn't bringing in any money and a lease with a landlord who would be happy to see him go; he'd developed a habit of driving golf balls with a three-iron inside the studio. He needed to get outdoors. On a second trip, two years later, he found out about an opening for a cook at the Gage Hotel kitchen, and he decided to move to Marathon. It took a while to get settled: "The first six months, I didn't take one picture. I was really intimidated. Where do you start? Mainly, when I got days off, I camped out. For the first two years I spent as much time outside as inside, just watching the light and how it affected things." He became a fixture around town, known for his welding goggles that he'd outfitted with orange lens filters to teach himself how to see in black and white. He left the Gage and opened up his gallery in 1990, initially calling it Lovegene's, a gesture to his new wife. Time passed, Gene and James divorced, and as James grew to understand the place and the people, he started producing the body of work collected in Big Bend Pictures.
THE PICTURES IN HIS BOOK tell more than the story of a boy and his desert. The great statement of James's work is in the portraits of the maverick souls who have found heaven in a last-chance-for-gas-and-serenity desert outpost. James himself is one of those people. While other photographers have taken their shots and passed on, he makes the same sacrifices as his subjects to live in this place he loves. His photographs acknowledge that shared struggle in the subjects' easy smiles; in the way a stiff-necked ranch hand will put up with his playfulness or a little kid will throw it right back at him. With his landscapes, James often includes a human element: a dirt road, a fence line, something that shows people's effect on the place. But in his portraits he achieves a level of comfort with his subjects that allows you to read in their faces the desert's effect on them.
The images are worlds away from Richard Avedon's In the American West series, the work James's portraiture is most often compared to. Avedon, a fashion photographer, took pictures of the same kinds of people James does, only Avedon cast them in harsh light against a sterile white background. He removed them from their context and made them look like freaks. James shoots people where they live, in mostly natural light, showing proud eyes against open skies. And his respect is implicit in the portraits' formal poses. "He gives these people credit for their intelligence and the purpose of their lives," said Keith Carter, whose own career as a photographer has done for East Texas much the same thing James's has for West Texas. "It's the difference between exploitation and exploration."
"The only person that both James and I have photographed is this old man in Boquillas," said Eccles, who has shot everybody from John Travolta to George W. Bush. "He's got a long white beard and is kind of a hunchback. His arm had been broken, and it's badly deformed. I don't know that man's name, but James does, and that's why his picture is better than mine." Sure enough, when asked about that picture, James said, "What? Andrew doesn't remember Juan Valdez?"
James can't hide his affection for these people, and he doesn't try. In a sense, every picture is an homage to something or someone. Cottonwood (Homage to Reagan Bradshaw) is a picture of a tree that reminded him of a photograph taken by his friend Bradshaw, who died in a plane crash in 1998. His critter series, the Death of Lucille French Clark, is a tribute to the landlady who rented his gallery space to him for $100 a month. After Lucille died, in 1991, James photographed an assortment of spiders and snakes on the floor and the furniture of her abandoned home. "People started saying that the animals represented nature reclaiming the house, and it sounded really kind of smart," said James. "I certainly didn't put that much thought into it, but I agreed with all of it. I said, 'Man, how did you know? I didn't think I was being so obvious.'" But he claims there's no such grand plan behind his work. He says he simply takes pictures of whatever's around, whenever it's right, to keep from getting bored.
"I remember one time James and I went into the national park together, and it was a horrible trip," said Eccles. "We argued the whole time. Then a tremendous storm hit, and it looked like lightning was hitting all around us. And there went James, marching away from the truck, into the lightning, with a metal tripod on his shoulder. And at that point, I didn't care if it hit him or not, but I yelled at him to come back. He didn't even turn around. He just hollered back, 'This is how you get the great shots, bud!' started laughing, and kept right on going."
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