044-051 sarah bird

8/6/2019 044-051 Sarah Bird

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/044-051-sarah-bird 1/8

44 | The

8/6/2019 044-051 Sarah Bird


J U L Y | A U G U S T 2 0 1 1 |45

FL A SH

B A CKStud ying photo journalism at UT led me f rom a degree in

anthropolog y to the lif e of a no velist, with stops at prison

rodeos, beaut y salons, and the LBJ Li brar y along the wa y

B Y S A R A H BIRD

Facing page: Taken on Congress in 1974 in ronto the old Lerner’s. This page: For some reason, I chose tolearn how to use a flash by dressing my very good sport o a

roommate, Cathy Staph Anderson, as some Swinging London/Carnaby Street antasy and posing her by a Dumpster.

8/6/2019 044-051 Sarah Bird


46 |The

It was the summer of 1974. I had a freshly minted B.A. in anthropology from the Univer-sity of New Mexico, a temporary job at the LBJLibrary that was about to end, and a boyfriendwho was leaving me for Scientology.

I needed a plan.I took to wandering the campus on my lunch

hour, as awed by the power and the might andthe marble as a peasant from the provincescome to Imperial Rome. The journalism build-ing called to me with its air conditioning anddrink machines. I ambled around the cool,empty halls sipping my Diet DP and vaguely fantasizing about being a girl reporter. On thethird floor, I stopped to peruse a bulletin board.

As I was considering whether to pluck a phonenumber off of an ad for “Roommate Needed”or one from the equally plausible “Passenger toSeattle Wanted,” a thin, cracking voice from anunseen source startled me, “May I help you?”

It was summer break. The only open door

on the entire floor led to what I’d taken to be abroom closet.

HE BEST THING THAT THE UNIVERSITY OF

TEXAS EVER DID FOR ME WAS TO STICK A

CAMERA IN FRONT OF MY FACE AND OFFICIALLY

JUSTIFY WHAT I ALREADY WAS: AN OBSERVER,

A RECORDER, A VOYEUR, AN INTROVERT DRIVEN

BY INSATIABLE CURIOSITY.

I peeked in. It was a small, windowless officeupholstered from floor to ceiling with teeteringpiles of paper. At its center was a slight, elderly man, his pronounced buckteeth displayed ina friendly smile. His manner was courtly in anold-fashioned way, more Southern than Texan,more country than city.

The old gent seemed to have all the time in theworld and an inexplicable eagerness to spendevery second of it chatting with a clueless strangerfrom New Mexico. I took him to be some sort of emeritus presence, a former professor so belovedthat he was allowed to linger long after retirement.Though I left feeling as if I’d had an audience witha skinny Buddha, I didn’t take the application he’dgiven me for his “program” seriously. I stuffed itin my backpack and forgot about it.

Until three days later. I was at work on the fifthfloor of the LBJ Library, unloading big brownboxes of miscellanea—photos of Lynda Bird’smakeover for her date with George Hamilton;

letters from schoolchildren outraged that Presi-dent Johnson had lifted his beagles, Him and

Above: In my first photoclass at UT, we were allissued Polaroids and wentof to Pease Park to click ofshots o each other. Right:

This cowgent epitomizescowboy cool at an Old-timersRodeo in Cameron, Texas.In rodeo broken bones andblood are worn as proudly as

license-plate size champion-ship belt buckles.

8/6/2019 044-051 Sarah Bird


J U L Y | A U G U S T 2 0 1 1 |47

8/6/2019 044-051 Sarah Bird


48 | The

Her, up by their ears; recipes for Lady Bird’sBunkhouse Chili—cataloguing the contents andrepacking them into mandarin red buckramboxes for display.

I had just finished cataloguing the last of sev-eral red boxes that I’d filled with small, heart-shaped boxes holding pieces of Lynda Bird’swedding cake—long since dried into leathery pucks—when I opened a box packed with photosof the First Lady. And there, right on top, was theskinny Buddha himself receiving an award fromthe First Lady.

I quickly dug that application out of my back-pack, applied, and was awarded a fellowship to

the graduate program directed by one of thelegends of Texas journalism, DeWitt C. Reddick.

The very first semester, though, I discoveredmy big problem with journalism: facts. I wouldgo out to “cover” a “story” and return knowingeverything about my subject: why she and herhusband were breaking up, how bad her ragweedallergy was, and how much she hated pimientocheese, but not, necessarily, her last name. Orwhat was in the dreary bill she was sponsoring.

Photojournalism, however, was another story altogether. A story where the facts reshuffledthemselves with every click of the shutter, whereno one could ever say they’d been “misquoted,”and you owned whatever corner of the worldyou could put a frame around. I was electrified

by a sense of discovery. Of capturing places,people, moments, that no one had ever seen

Left: I took this image oa trusty at the HuntsvillePrison Rodeo in 1974. I gaveit a sepia tint since evenback then this scene seemedarchaic and like somethingout o a past that shouldhave been relegated tocrumbling history books.

Above: Cowgirl legends,Margie and Alice Greenough,introduced me to a wholenew dimension o the word“tough.” They inspired mewhen I was creating the char-acters in Virgin of the Rodeo .

8/6/2019 044-051 Sarah Bird


J U L Y | A U G U S T 2 0 1 1 |49

before. Certainly not in quite the way that I sawthem. The thought that popped into my headmost frequently was a gleeful, “No one is goingto believe this shit!”

Best of all, for a shy person, a camera gaveme permission and a reason to talk to anyone.Delighted with this new superpower, I under-took as one of my first student projects photo-graphing shoppers at Hancock Center, a nearby mall. I immediately learned that my subjectsstiffened into taxidermy poses when I asked if Icould take their picture. But all I had to do wasinquire if I could photograph their sunglasses,or cool trucker hat, or cute earrings and they

instantly relaxed into proud possessors of styl-ish items, flattered by every click of my shutter.

Back at the University of New Mexico, I’ddreamed of being an anthropologist studyingexotic cultures, and now I was. A camera was my passport to anywhere I wanted to go. And therewere so many places I wanted to go. Wurstfest,a quinceañera, the snow monkey ranch in southTexas, shows at the Armadillo World Headquar-ters, the dayroom at the state mental hospital,an old lady beauty salon, and rodeos. Especially

rodeos. My first was the Huntsville Prison Rodeowhere I sat in front of a row of French sailors intheir Donald Duck uniforms muttering, “Quellebarbare! ” to each other.

Itwas barbaric, and I was hooked. Not on theactual sport but on the unique subcultures thatblossomed around what I came to think of as“renegade rodeos:” prison, police, kids, wom-ens, gay, African-American, charreadas, and old-timers. I even heard about a nudist rodeo held,naturally, in California, but I never got closeenough to that one to learn the true meaningof bareback riding. To say nothing of rawhide.

I found a home in the j-school in the shadow of

the big, rusty monolith on Guadalupe and 26th,but I found a clubhouse in the darkroom locatedthen in the basement of the geography building.There is a Christmas-morning moment that digi-tal photographers will never experience of rush-ing your film to the lab, loading it onto canisters,swishing, swirling, then holding the negativesup to the amber glow of the safe light. Was theexposure right? The shutter speed? Focus? Hadyou captured the magic you’d seen through your

view finder? Was it there?The photographers who gathered to develop

prints—each one its own wonder of chemicalbaths and precise sweeps of light—remindedme of the crews my navigator-father flew withduring the Cold War. Aggressive, funny, glam-orous, filled with bravado. We were shooters.

We were badasses. If you needed to be inside the rodeo arena, on the dirt, when they turnedout the bull, then that’s where you were. Ourphotos were the prize catches we brought backto the darkroom, and each one was a challengeto the others to step up their game. My grouphad especially talented members who went onto win Pulitzers, own their own studios, and fillthe pages of every important publication in thecountry with their work.

But the clock was running out on my fellow-ship and Journalism, unsoftened by Photo-,

threatened again: my master’s thesis was due. Itwas made clear to me that my extensive foraysinto the graphic world would not be toleratedfor this final project. I wasn’t ready, however,to emerge from the amber glow back into theharsh light of facts. Through some marvel of academic double-speak, I managed to get a pro-posal approved that would let me continue pho-tographing at my latest visual paradise, the HydePark Beauty Salon.

If I were ever to design a writing program,I doubt I could come up with a better projectthan my beauty salon thesis. It brought togethereverything I’d learned in anthropology—figur-

ing out how a culture affects an individual—andphotography—focusing on the details that tell

The photographers who gathered to

develop prints...reminded me of the

crews my navigator-father flew withduring the Cold War. Aggressive,

funny, glamorous, filled with bravado.

WE WERE SHOOTERS.

WE WERE BADASSES.

Top right: This photo is poi-gnant for me, not just because

the Diamond L Arena outside

of Houston is long gone, but

because, after I carefully set

this shot up with the friends

I had made over months of

photographing and interviewing,

after I calculated f-stops and

shutter speeds, and figured

out how to bounce the flash off

the low ceiling, a fairly famous

photographer stepped in right

behind me and took this exact

shot. I even helped him with his

flash settings. His photo was

later exhibited to some acclaim.

8/6/2019 044-051 Sarah Bird


50 | The

that individual’s unique story. I had a sense of urgency about capturing this world, since theowner had confided to me that she was sellingthe shop because she was getting too old to runit and because so many of the clients she’d hadfor decades were dying.

Here’s how I described the salon I called thePrincess Beauty Shoppe:

“The Princess Beauty Shoppe is a cozy, tacky

place cluttered with the affectionate debris of 40 years. A tray of brownies brought by a patroncombine their sweet chocolatey smell with theammonia stick of hair dyes, straighteners, andpermanents. The shelves are lined with dusty

jars and bottles filled with beauty products fromanother era. The chairs in the shop are filled by

the users of those products who come once aweek to have their hair washed, rolled, dried,and teased into the styles they’ve always worn:beehives; a bouffant pageboy; perms as curly andtight as poodle fur.

“‘Just say we’re an old lady shop,’ states theowner, Miss Faith, in a proud apology.

The salon did close, eventually replaced by acustom-framing shop, and I went on to discoverthe perfect synthesis of all my impulses to cap-ture worlds and people in fiction. I put aside my camera and never set foot in a darkroom again.

And now, except for rarefied art photography,darkrooms are gone as well. Chemicals, film, andlight replaced by pixels. But sometimes when thewriting is going especially well, when it takes mesomewhere I could never have gone on my own,

an exhilaration that seems bathed in a familiaramber glow overtakes me, and I think again, “Noone is going to believe this shit!”

Clockwise from top: It was so important or me to capturesomething true about the women o the Hyde Park BeautySalon. I was afronted by the school o photography thateventually led to Richard Avedon’s “Faces o the West.” I oundit demeaning and lazy to rip your subjects out o their environ-ments and slam them into yours; The regulars all had standingappointments to get their hair washed and set and sprayed intoplace or the coming week. Mostly, though, they came or eachother; My thesis looked at how beauty operators unctioned astherapists or women who’d never go to see a therapist. Whilethe permanent wave solution sets, these two riends share the

stories and secrets that they could only have told at the HydePark Beauty Salon.

I DISCOVERED MY BIG PROBLEM

WITH JOURNALISM: FACTS. I would go

out to “cover” a “story” and return knowing everything aboutmy subject: why she and her husband were breaking up, how

bad her ragweed allergy was, and how much she hated pimiento

cheese, but not, necessarily, her last name.

8/6/2019 044-051 Sarah Bird


J U L Y | A U G U S T 2 0 1 1 |51

044-051 sarah bird

Documents