Working Hands (Volume 8) (Clayton Wheat Williams Texas Life Series) - Hardcover

Williams, Rick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0890969558 ISBN 13: 9780890969557

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Hands on the saddle tamed the land. Hands on the pump jack tapped the vast resources beneath the land to bring new wealth. Now latex-gloved hands work in sterile clean rooms, built on but isolated from the land, to make the microcomputer parts that take Texas and the rest of the world economy into the twenty-first century. Hands at work – the lifeways of people. In more than seventy stunning photographs Rick Williams portrays the daily lives of Texans at work in the industries that comprise the three economic pillars of the state.

Ranching, oil, and now microcomputer technology have formed the backbone of the Texas economy and shaped the culture for at least the last hundred and fifty years. As different as the three industries and the people who work in them may seem, many factors link them, as Williams’s photography dramatically and often hauntingly illustrates.

The vibrantly reproduced duotones in the volume show people at work and at play – herding cattle, pulling pipe, and wearing “bunny suits” to process microchips. With effective documentary techniques, Williams provides portraiture and action shots that portray the kinds of people who work and the kind of world in which they labor. Grace and power, communication with animals and humans, evolving interactions with machines, geographic loneliness, and sterile isolation are themes running through his pictures, which effectively capture the play of light on the forms and character.

Williams offers a compelling visual exploration of the continuity and change, similarities and contracts of these three ways Texans have stood on common ground.

About this title

About the Author:

Williams has been a lecturer in both photojournalism and visual communication at the University of Texas and is a commercial and documentary photographer in Austin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Preface

During the twenty-year course of this work, my life and my photography have evolved, or perhaps integrated, to focus on the dynamic balance between grace and power. For me personally, grace represents the strength and choice to listen to the unspoken, the inner guide within us all. Power is the strength and choice to live in accordance with that guidance. Balance is the integration of grace and power as one.

My photography and the related interactions with the people and things I photograph have been an integral part of the process of learning to live close to this dynamic balance between grace and power. From the beginning, long before I was consciously aware of this concept of balance, my images symbolically portrayed this integrative unity. It has taken me two decades to begin to understand rationally what I have known intuitively all along.

Hand on the Saddle, an early image which appears on the cover of this book, exemplifies this process. The image was made in 1981, during the first year of this project, as Gary Hebel mounted his horse. It happened in an instant. There is one frame. I knew it when I saw it. My subconscious could frame it as an image, though I could not articulate it with words.

When we look at Hand on the Saddle from a symbolic perspective, we already know that the cowboy icon represents a rugged integrity that suggests the heroic. The dark hat, tilted down, represents looking inward, or the inner self. The clinched fists represent external determination or power, and the horse represents movement or change. The symbolic interplay of the heroic with the inner self and external determination sets up a dynamic tension on an intuitive level corresponding to the tension of the visual elements in the image. Grace and power are one.

Twenty years later I am acutely aware that this same philosophy underlies virtually every image I take, though most often I do not think about putting it there. My conscious awareness has slowly evolved to understand that the balance of grace and power underlies this work and guides my life, my art, and my academic research and teaching.

To me, this suggests that, beyond its literal and representational meanings, personal imagery not only reflects the present inner state of the artist but also points toward the continued awareness and development of the intuitive self.

About this edition

• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0890969558
• ISBN 13: 9780890969557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 132