November _2025
**A New Book**
I am proud to announce that U T Press is going to do a retrospective book of my work. We are still in negotiation, but I can say in this email that it will be coffee table size, and about 300 hundred images. I will include stories about the work and my life in Big Bend, and I have asked Terry Tempest Williams if she will write a forward and she has said yes. At this time it will come out in the fall of 2027.
**Selling My Archive_Part Three**
OK, so I am settled in, I have a crude darkroom and gallery, I’m starting to get assignments, and beginning a life of total artistic endeavor.
I also did weddings, portraits, copywork, and anything I could do to make money with my camera. I processed film for a photographer that was staying here for a few months. This was a great time. I was very happy. I wasn’t making much money, but somehow the bills always got paid.
When I was a young, struggling, drag racing photographer, I was friends with Paul Withers and his wife Sandy, who quit their teaching jobs to be drag racers, and run their own machine shop. We were talking survival tips one day and he told me that the “system” takes care of itself, and you always have the money you need. I swear that has always been true for me.
Maybe, whatever you believe is true for you.
I teamed up with Hallie Stillwell for weddings, and what a team we were. My first wedding in the park with Hallie was Susan and David Pampe. I picked Hallie up at her store, and we drove to Grapevine Hills for the ceremony. It came off without a hitch. (well, I guess one, pun intended.) We were all drinking champagne and celebrating, when Hallie had to go to the bathroom. She went over behind my truck and squatted. I fell in love with her right then and there. She was unpretentious, full of wit, and common sense. A true desert woman, who ran and held on to the ranch after her husband Roy died in a car accident in 1948. She was the iconic West Texas ranching woman. A diminishing breed, but there are still some great ones here.
I had this old Chevy Luv pickup truck, and while driving Hallie home from the wedding, the headlights stopped working. I had a Q-beam in the car, and so I rolled down the window, and with my left hand spotted the road, steering with my right. What an impression I must have made on Hallie.
One day, I was walking past Della and Dub Haley’s shop on main street where I had my own gallery for 17 years, and is now the V6 art gallery. I noticed a lampshade with images on it. I inquired about it and learned it was made by a photographer named W D Smithers. I called Kodak to try and learn what it was. After several attempts, I learned the material was called translite, and so I got an 8 x 10 sheet box of it to test. Yes that was it, so I called and ordered a roll of it. I found a place in Shiner, Texas that advertised “we can make anything in wire.” They made the lampshade frames. For the base I went to El Paso Imports, and made some adjustments to bases they had in stock. I got the string from Tandy leather, and so began the lampshade business.
Unfortunately, when I went to order the next roll, Kodak told me they no longer make it. They had two 100’ rolls left, one in Rochester, New York and one in Chicago. I purchased both of them. I made less than 200 hundred lampshades. I stamped a number on the ring, but not every one.
I put everything you can imagine on the shades. People, plants, and landscapes. I even made a couple with dead rabbits, and a rabbit foot pull chain. I still have a warped sense of humor.
Two wonderful things to come out of this was the Hill Country Reporter did a story on me and them, and when I took my shade to the Harry Ransom Center and showed Roy Flukinger, the first thing he said was “Ahh, a Smither’s lampshade, and I said, no Roy, an Evans’ lampshade.
I tied my name to Smither’s name, which was my true intention.
In the 90’s and 2000’s I shot for every magazine and newspaper. My personal work was featured in a lot of them too. John Spong and Texas Monthly wrote two or three stories on my work, and Richard Grant wrote about my work for the London Times Sunday Magazine, equivalent to our New York Times version.
It was getting known that I was “the” photographer of the Big Bend. I never did promotional tourism pieces. Honestly, maybe one or two in the very early, hungry days. There were a few itinerant photographers doing saturated color, pretty picture books for tourists.
I didn’t want to be that.
My work is more about photography. More about documenting a place with all it had to offer. To spend my life documenting my neighbor’s lives. The good parts and the bad. The joys and the tragedies. To do it with grace and dignity.
It is still my mantra.
I have photographs of Ike Roberts when he was young and healthy, to his last days confined to his room and in diapers, taking off his oxygen mask to smoke a cigarette. Hallie from the sharp witty rancher, to a nursing home, completely unaware of her surroundings. Lucia Madrid of Redford, proudly in her lending library, and then next to Hallie in the nursing home. Two amazing woman, totally unaware of each other’s presence.
D J Stout, Kathy Marcus, and Nancy McMillan gave me career building assignments. The killing of Esequiel Hernandez, Boquillas before it got electricity, Terlingua before it turned into what it is today, Steve Smith's Lajitas, and Kickapoo Indians on their reservation in Nacimiento Mexico. With the exception of the Lajitas story, images I made on these assignments ended up in my books and in museum collections.
I have a strong work ethic and an acute awareness of my time on the planet. I hiked and shot more than I could possibly print while I was young and healthy with the thought that I would print them as my body slowed down.
I have explored every genre of photography I could think of, and after all these years, I still have not seen anything purely photographic, that I have not done on film. That was my intention. I wanted the next photographer that tried to fill my shoes, to think, damn he already explored that.
Recently, I had my archive appraised, and I want to sell it to someone that can produce what I haven’t printed, and keep my work alive after I’m not.
An investor could purchase this work for a gallery or museum. This would set me financially free. I would still go to the park, shoot and print like always. I would still be building the archive. The only thing that would change is that I would not have a gallery, and depend on print sales for survival.
In closing, I have been fortunate to live the life I wanted to live. To make photographing the people and landscapes of Big Bend my life’s work.
Every one of you that is reading this has supported that endeavor, and I am grateful.
Because of your support I have created a body of work that will live on in Texas and photographic history. Now, I am looking for an investor or investors to take me through till the end.
Bill Wittliff’s quote of “What you are looking for is looking for you.” Is as true to me as Paul Wither’s “the system takes care of itself.” quote 50 years ago. Please contact me, and I will send you the appraisal archive information and how it can all work.