0.38 Geoff winningham, b. 1943  (Page 3/3)

Blind luck, big breaks, and books

I made this extraordinary range of contacts and the work that I began to do in ’68 and ’69 was kind of an extension of what I had done in grad school. Very experimental, kind of Bauhaus-type work—and it never really was my forte. I always was and still am basically what some would call a documentary photographer [or] a descriptive photographer. I’m interested in describing the world, not creating one on paper. Within a couple of years after being back here in Houston, my work began to move back into its more natural vein. I began to explore and to photograph what was around me rather than try to create the original stuff in photography. The guest artist series continued at Rice, and I met and invited Garry Winograd and Lee Friedlander, and they were enormously influential in terms of my work.

So in the spring of 1971, I kind of hatched this plan. I had come to be a great admirer of photographs of Arthur “Weegee” Fellig—the New York News photographer, and his “naked city” photographs of New York. I remember specifically saying to myself: “I love this city and nobody can see it like I can, so I’m going to be Houston’s ‘Weegee.’” So that’s what I began to photograph. If Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were in town, I’d be there. If a politician was speaking, I’d be there. If there was a ribbon-cutting, I’d be there. Then one afternoon reading the newspaper I saw where Johnny Valentine and Wahoo McDaniel were going to fight in the Houston Coliseum on Friday night. I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that my photographic life kind of changed that night. There was the subject I’d looked for. There was what I wanted. Lights, action, powerful emotion, great drama.

So you know, I photographed wrestling. I convinced myself shortly after beginning my weekly visits to the Coliseum that if Shakespeare were alive and well, he’d be writing scripts for the wrestling matches. As soon as I finished with that I did a book about it. Now this is a pure Houston story: I got nine months into this photography of wrestling and I had some good pictures. I knew I did. And it was coming towards a book. I showed it in New York in the summer of ’71—I took it to Peter Bennell at the Museum of Modern Art and he and John Szarkowski both kind of flipped over it. So I came back determined to finish the book that fall and I thought, “Where am I going to find a publisher?” I was totally wet behind the ears—totally green. I’d never done a book. Never thought about doing a book.

As a Rice student I had edited the yearbook, and the publisher’s representative for the yearbook was a man named Jess Allison. He was our rep, and he sold class rings and yearbook printing, and we became big buddies. Jess told me as the yearbook was finished in 1964, “You know, one of these days you’re going to come up with a set of photographs and you’re going to want to publish them. I want you to find me when you do.” So Jess Allison kind of popped back in my mind in 1971, and one afternoon I took a box of photographs over to his office on Allen Parkway.

I said, “Jess, I have a book now.” He said, “What’s it about?” And I said, “Well, it’s about show wrestling.” And I was ready to open the box and show him the prints. He said in so many words, “I don’t need to see the pictures. If you tell me they’re good, I know they are.” Then he said, “How many should we print?” I said, “What about 10,000?” He said, “What do you think it will cost us per book?” I said, “We need to find out.” So we went over to Jack Wetmore and Wetmore Printing and they priced the book. Came down to almost exactly a dollar a book—ten thousand dollars. Well that’s a huge amount of money in 1971. But Jess thought about five or ten seconds and said, “Well, let’s do it.”

Friday Night in the Coliseum came out, and then Going Texan in a year. When I visited New York, Magnum called me—that’s the big picture agency, Cartier-Bresson’s agency—and they wanted to visit with me and to know how I was getting these books done. I remember telling the then-director of Magnum the story about Jess Allison, and I thought she would fall off of her chair.

That was—that is—Houston. That’s why I’m here. It’s a very, very important thing in my mind. I was there because I could operate. There was that wonderful attitude of “go for it—we’ll make it happen.” Jess never looked at the pictures. He just felt that kind of faith in me as a person. It’s pure Houston, I think. I did feel and still feel literally blessed to have begun my career and be continuing my career in Houston. I think it’s a place where things have happened for me that literally wouldn’t have happened anywhere else.

Geoff Winningham was interviewed on January 16, 2007. You can listen to the interview here .