Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Roy Spence
Idea City Press
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Even cynics can find inspiration in THE AMAZING FAITH OF TEXAS, a surprisingly affecting survey of fifty Texans and their beliefs from GSD&M ad agency honcho ROY SPENCE. With brief interviews by Mike Blair and telling portraits by Randal Ford, these microbiographies delve into the creeds of Baptists, Buddhists, Baha’is, and every flavor of cowboy preacher and free spirit in between. The Golden Rule proves to be the uniting thread in this patchwork quilt of believers. And their universally photogenic visages suggest that when you scratch the author’s skin, you will still draw the blood of a true ad man.
O. Rufus Lovett
University of Texas Press
(Read an excerpt)
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Black-and-white is more than the chosen medium in WEEPING MARY, a photo essay about the tiny Texas town with this unusual name by Texas Monthly contributing photographer O. RUFUS LOVETT. It’s also the unmentioned divide embodied by a white lensman’s documenting of a poor and predominantly black community. Lovett’s fine eye for detail and composition—a small hand fan bearing a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. pops out from the corner of one image—is sometimes undone by questionable sequencing (a brilliant shot of Christmas lights on a bicycle loses impact when followed by five shots of similarly bedecked homes). Nevertheless, this is a handsome and compelling look at a world that would go otherwise unnoticed.
Wyman Meinzer
University of Texas Press
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BETWEEN HEAVEN AND TEXAS is dazzling. In a collection of meticulous prints, WYMAN MEINZER (who was proclaimed official state photographer in 1997 by then-governor George W. Bush) captures the limitless permutations of the Lone Star sky, from the serenity of cottony cumulus puffs to the bruising purple of a stormy sunset. The illusion of texture tempts you to run a hand across each page. A craftsman’s patience seems to be key; the sheer variety of skyscapes and horizons belies impossibly long stretches of time with a camera trained upward through rain and shine, day and night, sunrise and sunset. As with Meinzer’s earlier collaboration with writer John Graves, Texas Sky, complementary writings accompany these images: Texas Monthly writer-at-large Sarah Bird offers a typically wry meditation on clouds, and a host of poems, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye, illuminates the rest of the photos. The writings are intelligent and entertaining grace notes, but they can’t upstage the breathtaking visuals.
Bill Wittliff
University of Texas Press
(Read an excerpt)
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If simplicity can be the hallmark of genius, BILL WITTLIFF earns a gold seal for the sepia-toned photos in La Vida Brinca (“Life Jumps”). The Austinite, who is probably better known as the screenwriter of Lonesome Dove and The Perfect Storm than as a photographer, has turned a decade-long fascination with pinhole cameras—which he builds from such common items as shoe boxes or deconstructs from more-sophisticated equipment—into a gorgeous study of Mexican life. The pictures, created by light filtering through a tiny, lensless hole onto photosensitive paper, are defiantly low-resolution, but the soft-focus edges and occasionally mysterious scenes give the viewer permission to impose his own interpretation, making the images—of fiestas, bullfights, and religious rituals—remarkably accessible. Wittliff has dubbed his cameras tragaluces (“light swallowers”), the conceit being, one supposes, that the primitive devices are simply receivers, not manipulators, of the subject matter. Does removing the technology filter allow unsuspected spiritual and mystical elements to slip into these archaic boxes and imprint themselves on film? Consider the evidence.
