Dan Winters
Contributing photographer Dan Winters has won the most prestigious awards, shot for the best magazines, and worked with the hottest stars. For most texas monthly readers, however, he is known for a single, spare photograph that graced the cover of the February 1994 issue: the black and white image of Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson. So Winters, who has a studio in Driftwood, was the obvious choice to take the portraits for Pamela Colloff’s oral history of the legendary organization, “Law of the Land”. “I thought, ‘Cool, I get to shoot more Rangers,’” Winters says. “I’m friends with several of them. I was ready to fire it up.”
Anthony Giardina
Novelist and playwright Anthony Giardina never noticed that he tended to go on about Ray Price while he was a visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. But one of his students did. And now that that student, Jake Silverstein, is a senior editor at texas monthly it comes as no surprise that, at a recent lunch, the question would come up: “Hey, would you want to write about Price?” Giardina agreed, and in no time he was hanging out in the singer’s tour bus near Mount Pleasant (“Standard Bearer,”). “Instantly I was smitten in a way that I hadn’t been before,” says Giardina, who has returned to his home in Massachusetts. “The opportunity to muse about what he means brought me to a comfortable place.”
Wyatt McSpadden
“Who sets up a makeshift studio and takes portraits at a funeral?” asks contributing photographer Wyatt McSpadden with a laugh. “texas monthly. That’s who!” And it wasn’t just any funeral—it was the service for one of the first members of the Bandidos, the bikers who were once considered to be the most violent in the state (“The Gang’s All Here”). For McSpadden—whose first job for the magazine came in 1978, when he shot Amarillo’s Stanley Marsh 3—it was an assignment unlike any other. “Look at the subject matter, and look at the circumstances,” he says of the Bandidos. “It was a rare gift to get.”
