When I first came to what is now Big Bend National Park in 1950, I was a senior in high school on an Easter vacation trip with four friends. After my marriage to Alice, I continued my trips to the park and the Trans-Pecos area of Texas, bringing our children and our friends with their own small children. Our children have grown and married, and now we are introducing our grandchildren to this incredible area, the last outpost of the Texas legend.

Paralleling my visits to the Trans-Pecos region has been my growing interest in photography. As I photographed the Big Bend, I became less interested in landscapes and began to photograph people. I began to consider myself primarily a documentary photographer, interested in the beauty and uniqueness of people's lives. I also became aware that this richness of human culture is not restricted to exotic locales, and I began to realize that the Big Bend of Texas had an equally interesting collection of strong-willed people who measured their lives by their own standards and who loved the land with frontier independence. I began to photograph them and collect their conversations. The richness of this experience is something that will stay with me forever.

So here it is: the Texas Big Bend as I have experienced it.