VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Jung Center of Houston presents Geoff Winningham:Traveling the Shore of the Spanish Sea, on view March 16 through April 14.

Traveling the Shore of the Spanish Sea features photographs of the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico, from the Texas/Louisiana border to southern Veracruz. A selection of approximately 80 color photographs from the book of the same title. The photographs describe the rapidly changing landscape of the Gulf Coast, as well as the two cultures -- the United States and Mexico -- that share this historic coastline.

Geoff Winningham's career as a still photographer, filmmaker, and journalist has had many facets. He received his bachelor's degree in English from Rice University in 1965, then studied photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago with Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel, and Harry Callahan. After receiving his Master's degree there, he returned to Houston to pursue a career in creative photography, teaching, and professional photojournalism.

He joined the faculty of the Department of Art and Art History at Rice University in 1969, and over the next decade three books of his photographs were published in all, beginning with Friday Night in the Coliseum (1971), Going Texan (1972), and concluding with Rites of Fall (1978), his now classic study of Texas high school football. The first ten years of Winningham's photography and filmmaking all dealt with subjects either unique to or characteristic of Texas: rodeos, livestock shows, professional wrestling, and high school football games were among the subjects he approached.

The distinctive style of his 35mm black and white photography from that decade brought Winningham international recognition. His work was exhibited at major museums round the world, and his photographs were included in many anthologies, including Masters of the Camera, published by the American Federation of Arts (1960) and Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960, from the Museum of Modern Art (1978).

In 1976, in an introduction to Winningham's portfolio A Texas Dozen, the critic Robert Adams wrote of this work:

We nourish our faith in myth by an observation of ritual. Winningham, who records our participation in some of these sustaining rites, has given us pictures that are remarkable equally for their clarity and kindness; they demonstrate the truth of Jacque Maritain's suggestion that "art is a virtue like friendship." The events upon which Winningham concentrates are usually dismissed as popular entertainment. And yet, of course, rodeos celebrate a bashful, stringy individualism that we like to think of as American, wrestling matches give us a chance to safely heckle evil, and senior proms hold out the chance of escaping forever, suited in style, our ungainly adolescence.

Winningham has contributed to various photographic projects over the years, most notably the project funded by Seagrams and Company to photograph the county courthouses of the United States. The project, which culminated in the highly-praised book, Courthouse, brought recognition to Winningham for his architectural photography.

Beginning in 1980, however, Winningham began to develop a serious interest in the culture of Mexico and began traveling there extensively. By 1982 he had virtually given up black and white photography, his preferred medium of the 1970's, and turned instead to color, both in his still photography and films. In 1986 he published a book of color photographs of Houston, A Place of Dreams, on the occasion of the city's 150th anniversary. In 1987 he produced a book for Rice University, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the university. After those publications, he began to focus his efforts in still photography almost entirely on the subject of Mexican fiestas.

Winningham has produced three documentary films, including The Pleasures of His Stately Dome, a study of the Houston Astrodome as a folk theater, winner of the Documentary prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1976. He has written and photographed numerous magazine articles, most often for Esquire, Texas Monthly, and Travel & Leisure. In addition, he is the Company Photographer for the Houston Ballet, a position he has held since 1977.

His work is also included in many major anthologies of photographs, such as 20th Century Photographs from the Museum of Modern Art (1983), Courthouse (1978), Faces: A History of the Portrait in Photography (1977), and Masters of the Camera (1976).

Over the span of his career, Winningham has received two fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous commissions. His photographs are in most major collections in the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the major art museums of Texas.

In 1996 he completed his eleven-year photographic study of Mexican fiestas. Exhibitions of that work opened at the McNay Museum in San Antonio in September of 1996 and at the Tamayo Museum in Oaxaca, Mexico in October. His book, In the Eye of the Sun: Mexican Fiestas, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in December of 1996 with an introduction by Richard Rodriguez and essays by J.M.G. Le Clezio.

Le Clezio, the celebrated French novelist, wrote of In the Eye of the Sun:

The Indian world knows no borders; it is magnificently, magically, of a piece. Into this living past Geoff Winningham ushers us body and soul, as if into a dance.

In 2003 the Texas State Historical Association published Winningham's most recent book, Along Forgotten River. The book combines eighteenth and nineteenth century text sources with contemporary landscape photography. Eighty-eight of Winningham's photographs of the landscape along Buffalo Bayou and the Houston Ship Channel are interwoven with accounts of the earliest travelers who saw the same territory centuries ago.

In 2007 and 2008, Winningham collaborated with his wife Janice Freeman and eight Rice University undergraduate students to teach photography and printmaking to Mexican children in Mineral de Pozos. The project culminated in the traveling exhibition and catalog Mi Pueblo: The Pozos Childrens Project. In 2008, Winningham and Freeman founded a non-profit corporation, The Pozos Art Project, Inc., in order to continue to offer workshops to children in Pozos.

Today, Winningham continues to photograph extensively in Texas and Mexico, both in color and in black and white, as his attention has turned increasingly to the landscape. Since 2003, he has systematically photographed the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico, from the Texas/Louisiana border to southern Veracruz. His book, Traveling the Shore of the Spanish Sea, is scheduled for publication by Texas A&M University Press in 2010. He also continues to teach in the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice University and to offer workshops each summer in Mexico through Other Americas.