Joe Rogers, image copyrighted, used with permission.
To see more of Joe Rogers” photos, go here.
Critics generally agree that this is the best photo Joe Rogers will ever take:
Ok, that’s if you confine critics to the two people in the photo who live at our house. Joe took photos at our wedding. He also took photos of our children when they were small. My parents hired Joe for both, because they thought the world of Joe. They told me that very thing so often, frankly, that I was just a wee bit jealous.
Joe has a photography business. He takes photos of weddings, and of families, and if we needed an important photo, we went to Joe. He is a photographer in a pretty small town. There are other photographers there, but we went to Joe.
Joe is older than me, somewhere fewer than 10 years older, somewhere more than five. He was enough older that while I knew of him, I didn’t know him. I knew Joe’s wife, Becky, better than Joe. She was only a couple of years older than me, and we overlapped both in high school and at the University of Texas. As I recall, she worked for a time in Austin television news after she graduated. How did I know this? We were from a pretty small town, and you just know things. She was a smart, personable, pretty girl, and I’m certain she still is. When Becky married Joe it was a bit of a topic among my friends.
At some point long ago I realized that Joe was taking photos of cowboys. This wouldn’t make sense in a lot of places, but out of my small high school class, I always say that three of us ended up lawyering, and three of us ended cowboying, but I’m probably undercounting the cowboys. Ranching and beef production in that part of the world make cowboys real. On ranches, at large animal vet clinics, at the stockyards and sale barn, there are cowboys. I expect that our high school is still turning out as many cowboys as it turns out lawyers.
Joe’s cowboy photos were ranch photos. To me they aren’t romantic photos, they’re not nostalgic photos, but photos of what most draws me to any photo of men doing hard physical work; their intensity, their effort, their skill . . . As often as not Joe’s photos seem like glimpses of a larger picture: a glove, a group of men on a rail, a man’s back in a steel pipe corral, all of those bits in the photo speaking to everything going on when the photo was taken.
Just to be clear, photos of guys lawyering don’t have nearly the same punch as photos of guys cowboying.
I assume no one paid Joe to take cowboy photos, though I hope he’s made some money from them, and that he’s received recognition for them. Me, I have no skill for photography, even though like everybody else with a smart phone I take too many photos. What I realize, though, is that my rare decent photo is mostly luck. That’s less true for Kris, she has a pretty good eye, and most of the photos I steal are Kris’s. Joe though makes a living taking photos. He has not just a good eye, but honed skill.
During a now long-ago Houston mayor’s race, the race when Annise Parker was first elected mayor, a friend suggested that I get on Facebook so I could follow the campaign–Facebook was still new for most of us, and in those earlier days there was a lot of useful information, or at least gossip. Political campaigns largely run on gossip. I was on Annise’s finance committee, and was more intensely engaged than I probably should have been, so I signed up for Facebook. Funny thing though, not long after I signed up I had 50 or 60 friends, most of them not from Houston, but from my far away and long-abandoned hometown.
That reconnection has been for me a joy. I don’t really have any ties there now, but thanks to Facebook I can see my classmates’ grandkids, keep track of their anniversaries and birthdays, and too frequently mourn their losses. I can also time the arrival of Houston’s next cold front by watching for snow photos from Vernon. It’s usually about a 24 to 36 hour lag, but the snow doesn’t often make it this far.
Through Facebook and mutual friends I somehow connected with Joe, and I liked him. I usually agree with what he says, and he posts great photos. Most are of the Southwest: Utah, Colorado, and of course New Mexico. At one point Joe posted a photo of doorways in Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon. I had been there twice. I had looked through those doorways. I could not have imagined that photo.
Joe is a professional photographer, but he also takes photos as an avocation. I’ve been amused at the number of my friends and colleagues who have recently published books, or have announced that they’re writing books. Lawyers suffer under a curse. We write for a living. The best lawyers are excellent writers, and care for the craft. At the same time, most of our writing is ephemeral and narrowly confined both as to audience and purpose. I suspect that this rash of literary output by aging lawyers–and I’ll throw this blog into the rash–is in part because old habits die hard and in part because we want to leave something behind besides a finely crafted and long-forgotten contract clause. That and we find it hard to stop talking.
I think Joe’s impulse though is different. Getting ready to drive to New Mexico, I’ve thought a lot about Joe’s photos of the West, photos of red sandstone slot canyons in Utah, of a solitary fly fisher on the Frying Pan near Aspen, of those doorways in Chaco Canyon. I say too often that there are two kinds of Texans, Texans who vacation in Santa Fe and Texans who vacation in New Orleans, and Joe is clearly on the Santa Fe side of the ledger. Maybe a part of that difference arises from a small town sensibility, that for small town and country folk the difference between, say, New Orleans and Oklahoma City, is too subtle for us to be strongly drawn to one over the other. They’re both cities, and their charms, difficulties, and mysteries are, frankly, more of a kind than folk more attuned to urban subtleties can imagine. The difference between driving a country road in Western New Mexico and in the Panhandle, now there’s variety. Landscapes are something to ponder and appreciate.
And for Westerners, the western landscape is infinitely magnificent. I guess that Joe’s impulse is different in part because Joe’s not merely trying to beat the clock. He’s taken his photos for most of a lifetime. I’m sure like all of us he’s imagined other lives, of writing a novel or cowboying or lawyering or whatever, but as a town photographer he’s taken not just excellent wedding photos, but he’s stayed close to the places that define the West. His eye is on the West, and he’s been kind enough to share what he sees.