Texas Monthly August 2006 “Light in the Darkness.” By John Spong Starting on page 114 Exhibitions 2009 Afterimage Gallery/ 3 man exhibition Westin Galleria / Slide show and lecture Lecture and Slide Presentation University of Texas J & J Ranch Solo Exhibition 2008 Slide Presentation and Talk Front Street Books Slide Presentation and Talk Westin Galleria Stephen Clark Gallery / Austin, Tx. / solo Exhibition / Art Museum of South Texas / group exhibition Desert Candle / feature and story on my night work Al Rendon Gallery / San Antonio / solo exhibition Marfa Public Radio / interview Kingfisher Gallery / Elgin, Texas / group exhibition 2007 Westin Hotel / Dallas / dedicated whole hotel to my images. Alpine Gallery Night / Honored Artist / solo exhibition 2006 Texas Monthly / “Light in the Darkness”/ 8 pages dedicated to my images of night work 2005 Adair Margo Gallery / El Paso / solo exhibition 2004 Al Rendon Gallery / San Antonio / solo exhibition Texas Highways / photo essay on Boquillos, Mexico Texas Monthly / photo essay on Marfa, Texas Tadu Gallery / Santa Fe, NM / solo exhibition Adair Margo Gallery / El Paso,Texas / solo exhibition National Public Radio / interview Odessa American / story on myself my work Channel 8 News, Dallas, Texas / story on myself and my work Marfa Book Company / Marfa, Tx. / solo exhibition Afterimage Gallery / Dallas, Texas / solo exhibition Photo District News / article on myself and my book London Times Magazine / article on myself and my book 2003 Texas Highways/ photo essay / story on Shafter, Texas Texas Monthly / feature on myself and book release Steve Clark Gallery / Austin, Texas / solo exhibition Galveston Arts Center / Galveston, Tx. / solo exhibition Museum of the Big Bend / Alpine, Texas / solo exhibition 2002 Texas Monthly / photo essay on Highway 90 Texas Monthly / photo essay on Lajitas, Texas Adair Margo Gallery / El Paso, Tx. / group exhibition Terlingua House / Alpine, Texas / solo exhibition Organica Magazine / photo essay on myself Dallas Morning News / featured in article on Big Bend artists 2001 El Paso Museum of Art / El Paso, Tx. / group exhibition Houston Center of Photography / Big Bend group exhibition Texas Monthly / photo essay on Junie Herrera Texas Highways / photo essay on Marfa, Texas Afterimage Gallery / Dallas,Texas / group exhibition Anam Cara Gallery / Ketchum, Idaho / solo exhibition Marfa Book Company / Marfa, Tx. / solo exhibition 2000 Cowboys and Indians Magazine / 8 page photo essay of my work Longview Museum of Art / Longview, Tx. / group exhibition Texas Monthly /cover /photo essay on getaway places Texas Monthly / photo essay on Nature Conservancy 1999 Chile Pepper Magazine / photo essay on Terlingua Cookoff Texas Monthly / photo essay on Dude Ranches Outside magazine / photo essay Time Magazine / portrait of Jim Winders Avon Books / portrait of James Carlos Blake Men’s Journal / photo essay on Columbus NM and Alpine, Texas GQ / portrait of Jan Reid Texas Monthly / portrait of Henry Thomas Texas Monthly / portrait of B. Addington, G. Oliver and S.Curry GQ Magazine / photo essay on Angie Dean of the Starlight Theater Austin Museum of Art / portrait of Julie Speed Texas Monthly / portrait of James Carlos Blake 1998 Stephen Clark Gallery / Austin,Texas / solo exhibition Texas Monthly 25 years of photographs / three images in their book and one in traveling show donated to the Museum of Fine Art, Houston. 1997 Texas Monthly / photo essay on Boquillos, Mexico Texas Monthly / portrait of Theresa Todd and Jake Brisbin Travel and Leisure / photo essay on Big Bend Texas Monthly / photo essay on Kickapoo Indians Civilization Magazine /polo games in Juarez, Mexico Esquire Magazine / portrait on Carlos Carillos Texas Monthly / portrait of The Gallegos family New York Times / photo essay on Ernesto Cortez Texas Monthly / photo essay on The killing of Ezekial Hernandez 1996 Travel and Leisure Magazine / photo essay on Terlingua Governor’s exhibition / Austin, Texas / group exhibition Museum of the Big Bend / Alpine, Texas / solo exhibition The Art Museum of Southeast Texas / Beaumont, Tx./ six Texas artists Afterimage Gallery / Dallas,Texas / solo exhibition 1995 Sul Ross University / Images of the Big Bend / solo exhibition 1994 Tarrytown Gallery / Images of the Big Bend / solo exhibition Texas Photographic Society / Governor’s exhibition El Paso Museum of Art / “Shot in El Paso” / group exhibition 1993 The Center for Contemporary Art, Abilene / “Images of the Big Bend / First solo exhibition 1993 Wunderlich Gallery / The Governor’s exhibition / Statewide tour 1992 Harry Ransom Center, Houston / group exhibition SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS REVIEW MAY 10, 2008 ROCK PAPER SCISSORS SHOW James Evans faced a new challenge when he set out to spend weeks camping and taking photographs in Big Bend National Park last year. Since he has lived in nearby Marathon and shot photos in the park for the last two decades, he wasn't sure he could find original ways to capture the landscape. “It's like having a girlfriend for 20 years. How do you approach that girlfriend in a new and refreshing way that kind of keeps that love going?” said Evans, 53, who was in town for the First Friday opening of his show. So Evans, who has shot for Texas Monthly and published a book of Big Bend images, used multiple cameras, spotlights and time exposure to create the fresh images in “Rock Paper Scissors.” The exhibit features more than 30 silver gelatin prints and archival pigment prints. For “Painting the Rock,” he set up a camera about a quarter-mile from a huge rock, opened the shutter and made his way to the rock to shine a Q-Beam light all over its surface. The result is a trail of light leading to a weirdly illuminated rock, with Evans visible in the shot. Similarly, in “David's Grave,” Evans opened the shutter to photograph an open grave and “painted” the crosses in the cemetery with light to make them show up on film. Because of the extended exposure, the earth's rotation can be seen in the sparkling light trails of the stars in “Rock at Glenn Springs” and other photographs. In other images, Evans introduced artificial light to reveal sotols, ocotillo, cactuses and rocks in a vast landscape otherwise lit only by the stars and moon. The technique makes the desert plants and geologic formations appear otherworldly, as though they belong on an alien planet. “I don't think people have seen Big Bend like this,” Evans said. His photos of meteorological phenomena are stunning. “Dust Devil” is a striking image of a huge dust devil rising tall against the hills; “Red Rain” is a majestic cloudscape. Not all Evans' images are suitable for postcards. In “Hit and Run,” a spotlight shines on a freshly dead javelina. “I want to document everything that happens in the park, and it's not all pretty,” he said. Jessica Belasco WTHA Year Book  Vol. 80  2004 Big Bend Pictures Review by Robert W. Righter Readers of this Year Book will love this book.  James Evans has given us a portrayal of the Big Bend country of West Texas through his camera lens.  He features the vast, arid landscape, but even more so, the people who have been physically shaped by the land.  James H. Evans depicts a wrinkled land and some wrinkled people. Because of its large format and formidable weight, one is tempted to say that Big Bend Pictures belongs on a coffee table.  However, whether it should be placed there depends on the owner’s concept of a coffee-table-production.  I think of the term as rather derisive – pretty pictures and flowery narrative, but without any real substance.  It would feature landscape photographs, usually in color, snapped at the perfect time of the day for optimum light and weather, often at sunrise or sunset.  Rarely, of course, can the viewer duplicate such scenes.  Such photographic books have always been a tad annoying to me, simply because they build an expectation which cannot be realized by the average traveler and they portray a landscape which is not necessarily personal or authentic. There is no coffee-table perfection in Big Bend Pictures.  Evans works only in black and white, and although some images can be considered scenic, they are not the feature of the book.  Thus, Evans work shall not be considered a nature study.  The majority of the photographs are of Big Bend people, but you won’t find these people gracing the pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair.  His subjects have led a hard life – but not necessarily an empty one – and Evans conveys this fact in his choice of subjects and the way in which he portrays them.  For instance, one of his favorite subjects, an elderly woman named Hallie Stillwell, is shown at a nursing home, obviously in the final days of her life.  As they say, “not a pretty picture,” but yet it is evocative of birth, life, and death.  In many ways, one is tempted to say that Evans was influenced by Richard Avedon and his portrayal of the people of the American West:  Hard working, hard drinking, often dirty and disheveled, but possessing a certain dignity which we can call respect. Evans does not ignore the vastness of the Big Bend country.  Some of the black and white photos might make you believe he had consulted Ansel Adams, but most seem to strive for authenticity rather than technical beauty.  “Cottonwood” is an Adams-type scene, in which Evans has caught the cottonwood trunk and branches at just the right moment when the light and shadows illuminate the tree in a solitary special way.  But on the other hand, “Bracelet Vendor” depicts a small, barefoot child hoping to sell a few trinkets, but overwhelmed by the vast Big Bend land.  Yet the land is stark, and the distant mountains have a heavy haze.  Or is it smog?  Technically, it is a photograph which I could have taken with a point-and-shoot camera.  One thing is certain, as you turn the pages of Big Bend Pictures, you have no idea what is coming next, and each photograph cannot help but set you thinking. One publishing decision was annoying to this viewer.  Each of the 102 photographs is titled, but if you want to read the accompanying notes, legends, and stories, you have to go to the back of the book.  Frankly, as a historian I wanted to know the story which accompanied the photograph.  Thus, I found myself flipping a large cumbersome book back and forth, both awkward and annoying.  I supposed the decision for this format was an aesthetic one, assuring that the photograph should not have to compete with the story for the viewer’s attention.  However, I think this could still be done with a more reader-friendly layout. The Big Bend country is not for everyone, and neither is this book.  But for those who want to get in touch with a unique people and a remarkable landscape, there is no better way than spending a few hours with this book. Photo District News  October 2003 “Around The Bend” by Edgar Allen Beem The West Texas desert is lightly populated by all manner of mavericks- and James Evans is one of them. Wandering the Tex-Mex border country where the Rio Grande makes the big bend that gives the park its name, Evans photographs a land of cottonwoods and ocotillo cactus, tarantulas and rattlers, jackass and burros, rockhounds and ranchers, Kickapoos and cowgirls, artists and exiles, all living out their hard lives against a backdrop of the bleak and beautiful Chisos and Glass Mountains. Evans has been shooting the people and places of Big Bend for 15 years now, so his new Big Bend Pictures (University of Texas Press, 2003) draws upon a rich archive of some 60,000 negatives to invoke the tough, independent spirit of the region in 102 elegantly printed black-and-white photographs. “There are several books on Big Bend, but they are mostly landscapes,” says Evans “What was missing were the people. People have been living here for 12,000 years. What distinguishes Evan’s approach to Big Bend society is that he has made it his own. He is not an outsider dropping in to take anonymous pictures of Avedonian specimens of the American West, but rather a fellow desert rat making personal portraits of hardy individualists like himself.  Evans also has a keen eye for the ladies, particularly older women. Nonagenarian Hallie Stillwell, the local justice of the peace and proprietress of Stillwell’s Store in Marathon, is one of the main characters of Evans’s Big Bend, featured in six of his photographs.  Mrs. Stillwell, a local legend who has since passed on, appears formidable and robust in a 1991 portrait with her daughter Dadie, dancing her last dance in 1995, and then nodding off into oblivion in a 1997 nursing home portrait. Evans evokes another strong female figure in abstentia with his “Death of Lucille French Clark” series, four interiors of his late landlady’s home populated posthumously by a bull snake, a copperhead, and a tarantula. “When I started photographing snakes in the house,” Evans explains in his thumbnail note to an image of a snake curling around a picture of Jesus, “some were rambunctious and I couldn’t control their actions.  I put this one in the freezer for a few minutes to cool down its body temperature.” Evans’ photographs and, indeed, his photographic career are nothing if not unconventional.  Born 49 years ago in rural West Virginia, Evans grew up in New Jersey and Philadelphia wanting to become a machinist. Fresh out of high school, a friend sold him an old 35mm camera and he started hanging around the Atco Raceway, taking pictures of the drag races and selling them to the drivers.  In order to get more detail into his action shots, young James tried placing strobes beside the track, but the explosive dragsters invariably knocked them over.  Thus Evans became well known around Atco as the kid with the “flash helmet,” a strobe light mounted on a skateboarder’s helmet. In 1980, determined not to spend another winter in Philadelphia, Evans left home so abruptly that the roll of film in his camera at the time started out with shots of drunken Phillies fans celebrating the World Series and ended with pictures of the girls he met on the beach in Galveston, Texas.  He was inspired to head south, Evans says, by watching geese fly over from his rooftop and thinking, “These birds knew something I needed to learn.” In Texas, Evans drifted from Galveston to Corpus Christi, where he ran his own photo lab for four years.  He was content shooting weddings and portraits until the day he landed a job as second assistant to Annie Leibovitz who was in Texas photographing San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros for Vanity Fair.  Helping with the elaborate photo shoot, and seeing true genius for the first time in his life, got Evans really thinking, “So that’s how it’s done.  I can do that!” Determined to take a more artistic approach to photography, Evans relocated to Austin where he supported himself printing the work of Tomas' Pantin.  It was as Pantin’s darkroom man, says Evans, that he became a perfectionist when it comes to making prints.  “At everything else I am somewhat of a screw-up, but I can print to perfection.” Evans first discovered Big Bend in 1986 and two years later moved to Marathon where he got a job as a cook at the old Gage Hotel, despite the fact that he had no prior experience.  “I told them I knew what tasted good.” Evans says Big Bend “sang to me” the first time he saw it, but the calling to West Texas was as much professional as spiritual.  “For me, this was the place.  No one was documenting this part of the country in an artistic way. I knew if I worked diligently the work would hold up, and I could make my mark as part photographer and part historian.” Evans actually lived in Marathon for about six months before he started photographing it.  I preparation for taking on the vast landscape in black and white, “I would hike and watch the light. I was also somewhat intimidated by the concept of my decision.”Evans took to wearing a set of welder’s goggles in which he inserted wratten gels.  “I had to teach myself how film sees things” he says.  Big Bend Pictures testifies to the depth with which Evans has mastered his desert environment in duotone.  From panoramic landscapes, tight still lifes, posed and casual portraits, and odd bits of natural history (goatskins drying on a line, lightening crackling over the desert), the book presents the people and places of Big Bend in all their gristly glory.  “The only thing I would have changed,” says Evans of Big Bend Pictures, “is that I would have put a few nudes in the book.  People get naked around here all the time.  It’s a very natural desire when you are alone in the desert” The book was originally to have been published by another press, but when that publisher went belly up, editor David Hamrick took Evans’s Big Bend project with him to the University of Texas Press.  “James lives there.  He’s part of the community.  He’s dedicated his life to Big Bend, so he has a sense of the place that is spiritual, the way Eudora Welty knew Mississippi,” says Hamrick. Big Bend Pictures has been well received in Texas, selling close to 3,000 of its initial printing of 5,000 since it first appeared in April.  Evans, who runs a gallery in Marathon, has been busy promoting the book all over the Lone Star State and building a new studio for himself in town.  “I’m just going to stay here and keep shooting,” he says of his immediate plans.  “I have a new direction that’s a little more abstract.” Texas Monthly  March 2003 “Chasing Shadows” by John Spong Watching Big Bend photographer James Evans hoist his tripod onto his shoulder and traipse off into the desert one Monday in December, with grey sweatpants tucked into his boots, the hood of his kelly-green sweatshirt pulled over his head, and a red blanket tied around his neck like a cape – he looked like a slow kid’s idea of a superhero – brought to mind that favored explanation for West Texas:  You either get it or you don’t.  Big Bend is like an inside joke between God and the chosen few who view its barren expanses as the only antidote to the gotta-go rhythm of the “civilized” world.  Judging from the constant laughter pouring out of James, the joke’s not going over his head.  As he writes in the notes to his first  book of photographs, Big Bend Pictures, due out in early April from University of Texas Press, it’s a place “where the misfits fit,” and on this particular afternoon, I got a peek at what he meant. I’d been waiting two days for the great desert chronicler to take a picture.  We’d already blown off the deep, insightful discussion about his career and book we were supposed to have at his Marathon gallery to instead camp with some friends amid the dust, scrub, and rock on a ranch near Van Horn.  It was beginning to look like we’d never get anything done.  Every time I pushed James to take out his camera, he’d just laugh and say, “Hey bud, let me worry about the photographs.  You be thinking of a way to make me look mythic.” Finally, around lunchtime, he grabbed his tripod and set off without saying a word.  I called for him to wait up. “I like to be in a place all day,” he said without looking up from his viewfinder.  “I like to hike here and watch it and see what it really looks like, to get a better feel for its textures.”  He changed the filter on his camera lens, explaining that finding the right color filter is  essential to bring out the contrast  in the image, to differentiate little tone changes in the landscape that the film won’t pick up on its own.  “That’s the great thing about living out here,” he continued.  “If you’re on assignment, you’ve got to shoot in that time, if you live here you can wait for a time that’s perfect, and when it comes, man, we’re going to be chasing the shadows all day.” Although James Evans’ work has shown in galleries around the country for more than ten years – and has turned up regularly since 1988 in the pages of Texas Monthly – the surest way to get at it before now was to make that long drive to his gallery and drop $$ for a favorite print.  That changes with Big Bend Pictures, the most complete visual depiction of the region ever published, from the dustcover’s panoramic of the Glass Mountains just north of Marathon to the myriad portraits inside, most reproduced in his favorite fifteen-by-fifteen-inch format, and all in his signature dry-dirt-brown tone.  The book is the first to conceive of Big Bend in terms other than the Ansel Adams-style landscapes that fill the coffee-table volumes on bookstore shelves already.  James defines the region by its people, by its ranch owners and ranch hands, bar owners and barflies, judges, drug runners, teachers, park rangers, war vets, and little kids.  Portraits, therefore, rightly take up the lion’s share of the book, and the subjects are all rendered with an equal measure of respect and affection. James is 48, an unthinkable degree of seasoning for someone who seems to be permanently living out his post-college trip abroad.  He stands five feet six with a red beard and hair and has an open-to-anything, tickled-by-everything quality that most people lose when their parents cut them off.  Friends typically describe him as leprechaunish or impish.  And if you follow him around for a day, through his gallery and darkroom, in and out of the storefronts on the main street of Marathon, or up and down mountain trails, you’ll see him fall in love a dozen times.  “James has always been looking for something,” said his best friend, Andrew Eccles, a celebrity-portrait photographer.  “Before he got to West Texas, maybe he was having trouble deciding what he wanted to photograph.  But when he got there, he found it.” As kids, James and his younger brothers grew up in their mom’s home in New Jersey and Philadelphia, and he dreamed of being a machinist.  But in the mid-seventies, after a friend sold him a 35mm camera on the cheap, he started hanging around a drag-racing track and taking pictures to sell to the local sports page.  Atco Raceway lifers remember him still for his flash helmet, skateboard headgear with a strobe on top to keep his hands free to steady the camera.  “I liked staying up at the top end of the track, where the races finish,” he said.  “That’s where the cars would blow up, and if you were up there, you could get a really nice series of flames.  I heard more than one valve go by my ear.” For no reason he can recall, at age 26 he got into his car immediately after the Phillies won the 1980 World Series and turned it south. “I left right away from the party in the Philadelphia streets.  It’s all on one roll of film, guys dancing drunk on the tops of cars and the next picture is on the beach in Galveston.”  Two weeks of beach bumming later he landed in Corpus Christi, where he rented a darkroom and became friends with Eccles, a young photographer with a strong sense of direction.  When Eccles left for New York and took a job assisting Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibovitz, James stayed in Corpus, envisioning a smaller career shooting weddings and school pictures. A chance to help Eccles on a portrait Leibovitz was taking of San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros of Vanity Fair, in 1984, finally woke him up.  It was his first look at the big leagues, and he didn’t see Leibovitz do anything he couldn’t do.  “Right after that,” James said, “I thought I needed to get out of Corpus.”  Within a few weeks he was assisting Austin commercial photographer Tomas’ Pantin, learning how to print to Pantin’s exacting standards during some fourteen-hour days in the darkroom. James made his first trip to Big Bend in 1986.  His heart instantly took to the desert, its vastness, tempo, light, and scattered communities of renegades and frontier people.  All that was keeping him in Austin was a studio that wasn’t bringing in any money and a lease with a landlord who would be happy to see him go: he’d developed a habit of driving golf balls with a three-iron inside the studio.  He needed to get outdoors.  On a second trip, two years later, he found out about an opening for a cook at the Gage Hotel kitchen, and he decided to move to Marathon.  It took a while to get settled:  “The first six months, I didn’t take one picture.  I was really intimidated.  Where do you start?  Mainly, when I got days off, I camped out.  For the first two years I spent as much time outside as inside, just watching the light and how it affected things.”  He became a fixture around town, known for his welding goggles that he’d outfitted with orange lens filters to teach himself how to see in black and white.  He left the Gage and opened up his gallery in 1990, initially calling it Lovegene’s, a gesture to his new wife.  Time passed, Gene and James divorced, and as James grew to understand the place and the people, he started producing the body of work collected in Big Bend Pictures. The pictures in his book tell more than the story of a boy and his desert.  The great statement of James’ work is in the portraits of the maverick souls who have found heaven in a last-chance-for-gas-and-serenity desert outpost.  James himself is one of those people.  While other photographers have taken their shots and passed on, he makes the same sacrifices as his subjects to live in this place he loves.  his photographs acknowledge that shared struggle in the subjects’ easy smiles; in the way a stiff-necked ranch hand will put up with his  playfulness or a little kid will throw it right back at him.  With his landscapes, James often includes a human element:  a dirt road, a fence line, something that shows people’s effect on the place.  But in his portraits he achieves a level of comfort with his subjects that allows you to read in their faces the desert’s effect on them. The images are worlds away from Richard Avedon’s In the American West series, the work James’s portraiture is most often compared to.  Avedon, a fashion photographer, took pictures of the same kinds of people James does, only Avedon cast them in harsh light against a sterile white background.  He removed them from their context and made them look like freaks.  James shoots people where they live, in mostly natural light, showing proud eyes against open skies.  And his respect is implicit in the portraits’ formal poses.  :He gives these people credit for their intelligence and the purpose of their lives,” said Keith Carter, whose own career as a photographer has done for East Texas much the same thing James’s have for West Texas.  “It’s the difference between exploitation and exploration.” “The only person that both James and I have photographed is this old man in Boquillas,” said Eccles, who has shot everybody from John Travolta to George W. Bush.  “He’s got a long white beard and is kind of a hunchback.  His arm had been broken, and it’s badly deformed.  I don’t know that man’s name, but James does, and that’s why his picture is better than mine.”  Sure enough, when asked about that picture, James said, “What?  Andrew doesn’t remember Juan Valdez?” James can’t hide his affection for these people, and he doesn’t try.  In a sense, every picture is an homage to something or someone.  Cottonwood (Homage to Reagan Bradshaw) is a picture of a tree that reminded him of a photograph taken by his friend Bradshaw, who died in a plane crash in 1998.  His critter series, the Death of Lucille French Clark, is a tribute to the landlady who rented his gallery space to him for $100 a month.  After Lucille died, in 1991, James photographed an assortment of spiders and snakes on the floor and the furniture of her abandoned home.  “People started saying that the animals represented nature reclaiming the house, and it sounded really smart,” said James.  “I certainly didn’t put that much thought into it, but I agreed with all of it.  I said, Man, how did you know?  I didn’t think I was being so obvious.”  But he claims there’s no such grand plan behind his work.  He says he simply takes pictures of whatever’s around, whenever it’s right, to keep from getting bored. “I remember one time James and I went into the national park together, and it was a horrible trip,” said Eccles.  “We argued the whole time.  Then a tremendous storm hit, and it looked like lightening was hitting all around us.  And there went James, marching away from the truck, into the lightening, with a metal tripod on his shoulder.  And at that point, I didn’t care if it hit him or not, but I yelled at him to come back.  He didn’t even turn around.  He just hollered back, ‘This is how you get great shots, bud!’ started laughing, and kept right on going.” FROM THE BOOK TEXAS 100 EL PASO MUSEUM OF ART REVIEWS