Featured photographers include Peter Brown, Keith Carter, Earlie Hudnall Jr.(image above), and George Krause, all of whom have had long and distinguished careers as photographers in Texas and elsewhere.
Images from this show are here. The show opened this past weekend and is up at PDNB Gallery through July 2nd of this year.
When thinking about the South, Texas is an enigma among enigmas, a state large enough and perhaps culturally distinctive enough to be its own country, a state that often is more a part of our narrative of the West, of cows and cowboys, yet is also historically a part of the legacy of Southern history and culture.
When I set up this blog on Southern photography, I almost decided to limit it to the East-of-the-Mississippi South, but decided to include Texas in part because of the fine work of the Texas Photographic Society but also because Texas was part of the old Confederacy, and that history is hard to neglect.
When I look at the images in this show at the PDNB Gallery, I'm reminded of this question.
Earlie Hudnall's work could have been made just as easily in Atlanta or Memphis or Columbia or Charlotte or Durham or Richmond. Keith Carter and George Krause find images in Texas and all over the world that capture their romantic engagement with their subject matter. Peter Brown's images of churches and run-down buildings.in this show could have been made in lots of places in the eastern South, yet much of his work is made in the deserts and open vistas of the Big Sky West.
Lets just say this work helps us define the enigma of Texas rather than resolve it.