HARBOR WORKSExhibits Calendar
Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy | Bill Wittliff
July 1 – September 5, 2011
Once in a great while we find ourselves face to face with a way of life that belongs to another time, and we know that it cannot last—an existence so clear and resolute, it reveals how much the world has changed. So it was for a young photographer on a 3600-acre ranch in Coahuila, Mexico, where men on horseback were running cows as Creole Spaniards and their Mestizo workers had done since soon after the first half-wild beef herd was unloaded in North America. He was witnessing “the progeny,” he recalled, “of those first cattle and the men who chased and herded and worked them over the vast open ranges from sure-footed and well-reined ponies” that in time gave the West its most enduring legend.
Bill Wittliff of Austin, Texas, is a distinguished writer and photographer whose photographs have been exhibited internationally. As screenwriter and producer his credits include Lonesome Dove, Legends of the Fall and The Perfect Storm. He co-founded, with his wife, Sally, the highly-regarded Encino Press, The Southwestern Writers Collection and the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Texas State University in San Marcos. He is a past president and Fellow of The Texas Institute of Letters.
“Vaquero approaches sublimity in its absolutely genuine rendition of its subject. The photographs will give you a heartache for a world that has largely passed away from us.”
—Jim Harrison, author Legends of the Fall
“Powerful stuff.”
—Larry McMurtry, author Lonesome Dove
Presented in association with Humanities Texas
Restless Land: America in Real Photo Postcards, 1905-1920
A Virtual Exhibit
September 6, 2011 – April 30, 2012
It was the most popular form of communication, a social network of its time. Teddy Roosevelt was President, the Boston Red Sox had just won the first World Series, Ford’s Model A had rolled off the factory floor and the Hershey Bar had reached nearly every grocery store, when Kodak introduced the folding pocket camera, enabling anyone of modest means to make a real photo postcard. Before long thousands of Americans were sending pictures of their families, friends and communities—a folk photography of a rural society on the edge of commercialization and a frontier that would disappear within a generation.
From baptisms in the mill pond to battleship guns on the dry docks, Restless Land reveals a nation profoundly affected by the increasing concentration of industry and labor. The triumph of long distance telephone service, symbolized by a Ma Bell utility crew, and the dislocation of workers, expressed in a small town bread line, suggest the different perspectives that informed a “Progressive Era.” At its extremes were scenes born of fear and anxiety. In between lay a country of farflung farms, company towns and wildcat oil fields, drawn together by immigrants and machines, roughnecks and robber barons, preachers and politicians, wresting their fortunes from a turbulent land.