September 2025
**Selling My Archive_Part One**
After 36 years of photographing and documenting the Big Bend region and running my own art gallery, I am ready to change pace by selling my archive.
I have asked myself what does that look like and mean?
I would like to attempt landscaping and detailing this beautiful house we’ve built. I would like to learn how to sit on my back porch, maybe all day, and read a book. The reality is I would just phase out the gallery and not be open to the public. I love taking and making pictures and that is never going to stop, unless there is a physical reason I couldn’t do it. But it would be more like when I started out. Go to the park for several days, shoot a bunch of film, come home and process it, and make prints. It was a simpler time, not as many images to print. I was building this archive of work.
I figured out when I was about 20 years old that I wanted to be a photographer. I was working in a machine shop at that time, and a fellow employee, Jim Stanton, sold me his 35mm camera. Soon after, I quit my job and was literally off to the races, photographing race cars at the local drag strip. I worked up and down the east coast selling photos to drivers. I didn’t earn very much money. The crown achievement was that I was the official photographer for the United Bracket Racing Association. That organization grew strong enough that NHRA introduced bracket racing classes in their program. That is still going on today.
Nevertheless, it was a dead end career and the most that would come of it was features in race car publications like Super Stock and Hot Rod. I did get assignments from them occasionally, but not enough to make a career of it.
The other lessons I learned from the race track was photographic timing, that every emotion is at a race track, and people get killed doing it.
The winter of 1979 was so cold, I thought I am not spending another winter on the East Coast. It sounds simple, but I would lay on the roof of my house and watch geese fly south. I thought even they are smart enough to leave, and so I did. It was late October, and the Phillies won the world series. On the roll of film in the camera it shows people partying in the streets of Philadelphia and at the end of the roll is me on the beach in Galveston.
I was so scared and yet so excited. It was the first time I was on my own, not having to consider any one else’s feelings or opinions.
I ended up in Corpus Christi, and lived there for four years. I mostly did odd jobs, and worked in a photo lab. I met good people there. Friends I still have. One being Andrew Eccles. We met a month before he moved to New York, and was immediately hired as Annie Leibovitz's assistant. For three years he travelled the world with her. He called me to ask if I would be second assistant for a shoot Annie was doing in San Antonio.
Of course I did, and we spent three days scouting and photographing Henry Cisneros. Watching Annie, watching genius, transformed me. I returned to Corpus and changed every thing about how I lit a subject, the attention I paid to location and expressions in my portraiture. I knew too, I had to leave this town. I purchased a book called American Showcase. It is a book of photographers and their work. So say an Art Director wants to hire a food photographer in Arizona, he might be able to find one in this book. I found 4 or 5 photographers whose work I liked and location I would consider moving to, and wrote them letters to be an assistant. Only one responded. Tomas’ Pantin in Austin. It seemed like I mailed the letter on Tuesday, he called me on Thursday and on Friday I interviewed and got the job.
I was Tomas’ darkroom printer, and it is there I learned how to print and to understand the Zone system. Tomas' was an excellent teacher. He was really tough on me, but I was so stubborn and hard headed, I don’t know how he did it.
After two years with Tomas' I opened my own studio with Cindy Goin. She was Tomas’s studio manager, and we were both ready to strike out on our own. I did pretty good there, but still there was a knawing inside of me of what was going to be my life’s work. I knew that this wasn’t it.
Then my girlfriend at the time introduced me to Big Bend. I loved it. I went back two more times, and on that third visit with Clif Ladd, we stopped at the Gage Hotel, because he knew the cook. I learned that they were looking for a cook to replace one that was leaving. With that in my head we went to the park. I met and partied with Uncle Joe, Aunt Roberta, John Suffaco, and Susan Bryant. It was right there in that restaurant, in that moment, shooting Polaroids, I knew I had found home. I loved these people.
They were educated dropouts.
Misfits.
We stopped back by the Gage on the way home, and I applied for the job. Giddings Brown was the manager, and he asked me if I ever cooked before? I believe I said something like "no, but I know what taste good." Either Giddings saw something in me or he was desperate, but I got the job.
I moved to Marathon on December 28, 1988.
I had arranged by phone a studio space, but when I arrived with three truckfuls of furnishings and equipment, my would be landlord decided he did not want to rent. I told Giddings I really needed a building to set up shop. He offered me what is now the V6, but it was JP Bryan’s building, and I could never own it. We went across the railroad tracks and there it was. A building with a big barn in the back. It belonged to Lucille French Clark. She lived in the two story next to it. I was wearing a full length wool coat, and Giddings suggested I take it off, so we didn’t look like gangsters.
Inside, in the back bedroom, in bed, was this frail little woman with arthritic, bent like wings, fingers. I explained my situation to Lucille and she told me where to find the key to her building to go look around. It was rough, but it was big enough, and I saw potential. I went back inside and told her I would like to rent it. She asked where was I going to live? I figured in the building, but she also had a little house down the walk, so I went at looked at that too. It’s about 500 square feet, but would work. She rented me the building for $100. a month, and the little house for $50.
I hugged her so hard she crunched.
My photographic career and life’s work was at it’s beginning. After 34 years and 215 days I finally found it.
Part two, next month.
The images in this email were taken when I was in my early 20's. I didn't know the *Zone System or much about photography. I was reading as much as I could, going to photo exhibits in Philadelphia, studying photographers like Diane Arbus, Arnold Newman, Andre Kertesz, Duane Michals and Andrea Feininger to name a few. I think you can see a budding style emerging, but certainly not realized. I was mostly photographing my family and friends.
*Ansel Adams theory of exposure and development.