An East Texas Photo Essay

Soon after purchasing my first single lens reflex camera, still in my early twenties, and only a year out of college, I had a job that sent me to East Texas to work on a construction project near the small town of Tyler. I was given a per diem for food and housing, enough for a motel room and restaurant food. Not drawn to that lifestyle, I rented a tenant farmer’s house with four rooms and an outhouse on a nearby country road. This reduced my living expenses, and also satisfied my romantic ideas of experiencing country life, a major change from having lived in large cities all my life. On moving in, I started a vegetable garden, filled the kitchen pantry with dry goods, and set up a rudimentary darkroom.

My job was to make progress inspections, which meant I took notes and photographed the construction work. Dramatic images were easy to find.

For some reason the farmer who rented me the house took a shining to me and we became friends. I helped him load hay bales onto his pickup. I was twenty-three; he was sixty-three and he loaded the bales twice as fast as I could.

He invited me to his house for his family’s Sunday afternoon supper. The invitation came with no restrictions on photographs and to everyone’s delight a granddaughter took center stage.

Rural East Texas was not the Texas of popular imagination at the time—Larry McMurtry’s great plains with endless vistas and big skies, straight-as-an-arrow farm-to-market roads, vast ranches, and the wide dusty streets of small towns like Archer City where The Last Picture Show was filmed. Its geography and culture was, and probably still is, more like that of the Deep South: family farms, backwoods dirt roads, rural poverty, and moist bottomlands subject to floods.

I decided to photograph the countryside in the manner of Walker Evans. I had been reading his and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which documented the lives of sharecroppers in Alabama during the Great Depression, and was struck by how similar many of the images in Evans’ photographs taken forty years earlier resembled the East Texas I lived in. While my immediate interest was photographic, I had studied architecture in college and was drawn to the shed forms of the weathered wood barns and farmhouses. The proportions seemed to be naturally beautiful, and the patina of aged wood gave the impression they had emerged over time as an organic outcropping of the land itself.

But unlike images of impoverishment that Evans found in the dying farmlands of Alabama during the Depression, I found that even in the poorest places the land in East Texas was fertile and the old and improvised wood homesteads appeared tidy and dignified.

Among many sharecropper’s houses I came across was one the history books call a “Dog Trot.” It was common to the Deep South and goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century. A one-story house, it had a covered front porch across its entire front and a wide breezeway that ran from front to back through its center. The breezeway was the defining feature; it separated two two-room living spaces, providing both sides of the house with cross ventilation and shade, and a place where the dogs were kept—hence the name.

I spent part of a Sunday photographing such a house and the two men who lived in it. I discovered it two miles from my house after an afternoon of driving around the countryside. The house was about fifty yards off the road behind an oak tree and nestled into fields of collard greens and corn, and its backlit silhouette had caught my eye. I could see two men sitting on rockers on the front porch. I stopped the car, backed up, and, mustering the nerve, turned the car onto a dirt driveway and slowly parked under the oak tree. Getting out of the car, I approached the house. My camera was hanging from my shoulder. The men stood up, saying nothing.

I noticed that one, tall and older than the other, had an elegance about his carriage, and he wore clean coveralls over a pressed dress shirt—perhaps he had attended church earlier in the day. The younger man was also dressed in coveralls, but covering only a nightshirt. He was barefoot.

As friendly as I could, I introduced myself as an architecture student—I fudged on that, as I had been an architectural student once—and said I liked their house, which I did, and could I take a few photographs of it. Trying to establish my credibility I also bragged, “This is a Dog Trot House, isn’t it?” The older man spoke first.

“Dog Run,” he said, correcting me. So much for the professors, I thought to myself; of course, farm dogs run, not trot. Show dogs trot.

Getting past that, to my great relief the conversation moved on in a promising direction, and after the usual question and answer period of “What are you going to do with the photographs?” and “No, I don’t want to buy your property,” the men seemed to warm up to me, if in a reserved way. They were tolerant of me, this callow, uninvited Sunday visitor, and gave me permission to photograph not only the house but, after I had gathered up the nerve to ask, their portraits. In about an hour I put together a small album for them, and me.