FLASH

backStudying photojournalism at UT led

me from a degree in
anthropology to the life of a novelis
t, with stops at prison
Library along the way
rodeos, beauty salons, and the LBJ

by Sarah Bird
Facing page: Taken on Congress in 1974 in front
of the old Lerner’s. This Page: Learning to use a flash
with my patient roommate as a subject.
28 | The july / august 2 01 1 | 29

Above: Photo class started
off with all of getting Pola-
roid cameras and clicking
off shots of each other. Here
I am in Pease Park. Right:
Old-timers rodeo
30 | The
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.
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 LBJ
Library that was about to end, and a boyfriend
who 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 and the
marble as a peasant from the provinces come to
Imperial Rome. The journalism building called to
me with its air conditioning and drink machines.
I ambled around the cool, empty halls sipping my
Diet DP and vaguely fantasizing about being a girl
reporter. On the third floor, I stopped to peruse a
bulletin board. As I was considering whether to
pluck a phone number off of an ad for “Room-
mate Needed” or one from the equally plausible
“Passenger to Seattle Wanted,” a thin, cracking
voice from an unseen 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 a
broom closet.
I peeked in. It was a small, windowless office
upholstered from floor to ceiling with teetering
piles of paper. At its center was a slight, elderly
man, his pronounced buckteeth displayed in
a friendly smile. His manner was courtly in an
old-fashioned way, more Southern than Texan,
more country than city.
The old gent seemed to have all the time
in the world and an inexplicable eagerness to
spend every second of it chatting with a clueless
stranger from New Mexico. I took him to be some
sort of emeritus presence, a former professor so
beloved that he was allowed to linger long after
retirement. Though I left feeling as if I’d had an
audience with a skinny Buddha, I didn’t take
the application he’d given me for his “program”
seriously. I stuffed it in my backpack and forgot
about it.
Until three days later. I was at work on the fifth
july / august 2 01 1 | 31

floor of the LBJ Library, unloading big brown
boxes of miscellanea—photos of Lynda Bird’s
makeover for her date with George Hamilton;
letters from schoolchildren outraged that Presi-
dent Johnson had lifted his beagles, Him and
Her, up by their ears; recipes for Lady Bird’s
Bunkhouse Chili—cataloguing the contents and
repacking them into mandarin red buckram
boxes 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’s
wedding cake—long since dried into leathery
pucks—when I opened a box packed with photos
of the First Lady. And there, right on top, was the
skinny Buddha himself receiving an award from
32 | The
the 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 the
legends of Texas journalism, DeWitt C. Reddick.
The very first semester, though, I discovered
my big problem with journalism: facts. I would
go out to “cover” a “story” and return knowing
everything about my 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. Or
what was in the dreary bill she was sponsoring.
Photojournalism, however, was another story
altogether. A story where the facts reshuffled
themselves with every click of the shutter, where
The photographers who gathered to
develop prints...reminded me of the
crews my navigator-father flew with
during the Cold War. Aggressive,
funny, glamorous, filled with bravado.
We were shooters.
We were badasses.
Left: **she didn’t have a Top Right: This photo is
cpation for this image. poignant for me, not just
Above: Girls rodeo. Clearly, because the Diamond L
I wanted to tell stories... Arena where I took it is long
gone, but because a fairly
famous photographer took
this exact same photo of the
friends who were posing for
me and went on to exhibit it
to some acclaim; At a char-
reada in San Antonio
no one could ever say they’d been “misquoted,”
and you owned whatever corner of the world
you could put a frame around. I was electrified
by a sense of discovery. Of capturing places,
people, moments, that no one had ever seen
before. Certainly not in quite the way that I saw
them. The thought that popped into my head
most frequently was a gleeful, “No one is going
to believe this shit!”
Best of all, for a shy person, a camera gave
me 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 subjects
stiffened into taxidermy poses when I asked if I
could take their picture. But all I had to do was
inquire 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’d
dreamed of being an anthropologist studying
exotic cultures, and now I was. A camera was my
passport to anywhere I wanted to go. And there
were so many places I wanted to go. Wurstfest,
a quinceañera, the snow monkey ranch in south
Texas, 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 Rodeo
where I sat in front of a row of French sailors in
their Donald Duck uniforms muttering, “Quelle
barbare!” to each other.
It was barbaric, and I was hooked. Not on the
actual sport but on the unique subcultures that
blossomed 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 close
enough to that one to learn the true meaning
of 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 located
then 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 negatives
up to the amber glow of the safe light. Was the
exposure right? The shutter speed? Focus? Had
you 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 chemical
baths and precise sweeps of light—reminded
me of the crews my navigator-father flew with
during 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 turned
out the bull, then that’s where you were. Our
photos were the prize catches we brought back
to the darkroom, and each one was a challenge
to the others to step up their game. My group
had especially talented members who went on
to win Pulitzers, own their own studios, and fill
the pages of every important publication in the
country 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. It
was made clear to me that my extensive forays
into the graphic world would not be tolerated
for this final project. I wasn’t ready, however,
to emerge from the amber glow back into the
harsh 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 Hyde
Park Beauty Salon.
If I were ever to design a writing program,
july / august 2 01 1 | 33
I doubt I could come up with a better project
than my beauty salon thesis. It brought together
everything I’d learned in anthropology—figur-
ing out how a culture affects an individual—and
photography—focusing on the details that tell
that individual’s unique story. I had a sense of
urgency about capturing this world, since the
owner had confided to me that she was selling
the shop because she was getting too old to run
it and because so many of the clients she’d had
for decades were dying.
Here’s how I described the salon I called the
Princess Beauty Shoppe:
“The Princess Beauty Shoppe is a cozy, tacky
place cluttered with the affectionate debris of

I discovered my big problem

with journalism: facts. I would go
out to “cover” a “story” and return knowing everything about
my 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.

40 years. A tray of brownies brought by a patron

combine their sweet chocolatey smell with the
ammonia stick of hair dyes, straighteners, and
permanents. The shelves are lined with dusty
jars and bottles filled with beauty products from
another era. The chairs in the shop are filled by
the users of those products who come once a
week to have their hair washed, rolled, dried,
and teased into the styles they’ve always worn:
beehives; a bouffant pageboy; perms as curly and
tight as poodle fur.
“‘Just say we’re an old lady shop,’ states the
owner, Miss Faith, in a proud apology.
The salon did close, eventually replaced by a
custom-framing shop, and I went on to discover
the 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, and
light replaced by pixels. But sometimes when the
writing is going especially well, when it takes me
somewhere I could never have gone on my own,
an exhilaration that seems bathed in a familiar
amber glow overtakes me, and I think again, “No

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