Overview

"Since he first dreamed of a career in photography, Guy Gillette has traveled regularly to his wife's family's ranch, located outside the small town of Crockett, Texas. When Gillette first came to the Porter Place, as the ranch has always been known, he began to photograph the Porter family and their land. Thanks to Gillette's sense of composition, these wonderful black-and-white photographs, dating from the 1940s, led to his career as a magazine photographer. Collected here for the first time, they document small-town life in East Texas, where Guy Gillette's sons, the musical duo the Gillette Brothers, still run cattle. A Family of the Land offers a portrait of a community over a half century during which remarkably little has changed. Midway between Dallas and Houston, the Porter Place is where the South meets the West. The pastures began as cotton fields carved out of piney woods, and the cowboys use southern curs to control the cattle. One of the photographs presented here, of a boy and his dog at the veterinarian's office, is said to have moved Museum of Modern Art curator Edward Steichen to tears. Gillette also captures cowboys at work and at play, branding and marketing their animals, enjoying a game of dominoes, driving trucks with """"2-50"""" air conditioning - two windows down, fifty miles an hour. """"Though photography is often called art,"""" says Gillette, """"I have wanted to be artless: to be a documentarian, not an artist. . . . Telling a story was always the attraction of photography for me."""" The story ends with the outdoor wedding of Guy Porter, one of the Gillette Brothers, at the Porter Place. Family, labor, and land remain, inseparable."

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9780806144047

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Reviews

The East Texas cowboy would strike many in America as an artifice of loud Houston bars and heaving mechanical bulls, but the piney woods cattle ranch is where the West really does confront the South.What a fortunate aid to imagining that world, then, to have celebrated photographer Guy Gillette s documentary record of the Porter Place, his in-laws East Texas ranch, gathered in this beautiful book. And what a valuable assist to have Texas songwriter Andy Wilkinson s graceful and poetic prose to link photos, place, and time. Dan Flores, author of The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains and Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West

-The East Texas cowboy would strike many in America as an artifice of loud Houston bars and heaving mechanical bulls, but the piney woods cattle ranch is where the West really does confront the South. What a fortunate aid to imagining that world, then, to have celebrated photographer Guy Gillette's documentary record of the Porter Place, his in-laws' East Texas ranch, gathered in this beautiful book. And what a valuable assist to have Texas songwriter Andy Wilkinson's graceful and poetic prose to link photos, place, and time.---Dan Flores, author of The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains and Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West

The East Texas cowboy would strike many in America as an artifice of loud Houston bars and heaving mechanical bulls, but the piney woods cattle ranch is where the West really does confront the South. What a fortunate aid to imagining that world, then, to have celebrated photographer Guy Gillette's documentary record of the Porter Place, his in-laws' East Texas ranch, gathered in this beautiful book. And what a valuable assist to have Texas songwriter Andy Wilkinson's graceful and poetic prose to link photos, place, and time. --Dan Flores, author of The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains and Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West

Author Information

Andy Wilkinson is a writer and singer. His work centers on the American West. B. Byron Price is Director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of the American West and holds the Charles Marion Russell Memorial Chair in the School of Art and Art History, University of Oklahoma, Norman.

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