TexasGirl Photography

Happy New Year, friends! It’s January, so once again that means it’s time to start some new projects! This is a long-ish post but stick with me, I promise it’s all connected.

I have a few things in the works, all jostling for top position.

Number One: I want to file my DBA and officially kick start my professional photography career (hopefully it becomes a career, y’all wish me luck because I need it, and some divine intervention – there’s a lot of competition out there and competition is not a place where I thrive).

Number One.1: I want / need to get to work digitizing my Dad’s photo archive. Thanks to some attention from some famous fixer-uppers in Waco, his photography, and his collection of historic photographs, is in the limelight a little bit. For his sake, I’ve started his Instagram back up, made a website for him, and am planning to start wrangling a tremendous number of prints and negatives.

Number One.3: Frugal Film Project 2024! My ideas are still in flux, but more than likely it will be tied in to One.1 and One.4. More about this later. . . . .

Number One.4: My film sister Katya Rowny came up with the idea for a 12 month project tailor made for someone like me who has an embarrassing amount of cameras (most of them given to me, but still). The basic idea is to pick a different camera each month and use it, then share the photos, but people who don’t happen to have 12 cameras can still participate by using a different film stock each month. This is all happening on Instagram.

SO! Here’s where it all comes together – here’s the point. Combining most of the things that are vying for my concentration this January (the exception being the one that might make me money; as usual that one comes last), I am embarking on a project that will celebrate where I come from and the reason I photograph in the first place.

To make a long story short, for those of you who don’t know this: my Dad photographed in my hometown of Waco, TX from 1953 until a stroke took him out of action in 2020. Along the way he became friends with some of Waco’s legendary photographers (Jimmie Willis and Windy Drum) and acquired / inherited a vast quantity of negatives and photo gear from them. I knew both Jimmie and Windy when I was young, and I remember going to Windy’s studio with my Dad after Windy died in 1988.

Here’s a couple of photos from A Pictorial History of Waco, Volume 2 of Windy and his studio

In 2005 or so, my Dad gave me my first medium format camera: a Rolleiflex that belonged to Windy Drum. I remember having heard about medium format and thinking yeah yeah how much better can it be? I quickly realized the reason people wax lyrical about it, after one test roll and a couple of photo outings with my Dad. Here are some images from my start with the camera (Kodak Tri-X) including one of my all-time favorites since it’s my Dad and me in shadow – with locomotives – y’all I don’t think I’ve ever made another more appropriately symbolic photo.

I took the Rollei with me back to New York (where I was living at the time). Here’s a few photographs that I made with it there, in my old ‘hood up in Yorkville (Manhattan).

AND HERE IT IS

The crux of this whole post

For my January 12 months project I’m going to Waco with Windy’s old Rollei, loading it up with Tri-x, and photographing downtown, hopefully in and around the hotel where some of Dad’s photographs are hanging. Frugal Film will go with me, too, with a roll of Kentmere Pan 400 loaded into some cheap camera or another.

The “plan” for every month of this year is to return to my hometown with a different camera Dad’s given me, and Frugal Film rolls, and make the whole thing into a larger body of work. (I got a copy of Nancy Rexroth’s Iowa for Christmas which has me extra inspired). All the cameras I’m going to use for 12monthsonfilm will be ones I received as gifts, either from Dad or from other generous friends.

Happy New Year! Thank you for making it to the end! Comments welcome!