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. During college days I made camping trips to the area to photograph and explore the undeveloped and little-known desert mountains. After my marriage to Alice and my return to Abilene upon graduation from the University of Texas at Austin, 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. Sometime during high school I came into the ownership of a 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 press camera. The first photograph I took in the Big Bend was made with that camera at the entrance sign to the park. The black and white negatives and most of the photographs of those high school days have since disappeared, perhaps during the process of moving or in one of my periodic spasms of organization.

As I photographed the Big Bend, I became less interested in landscapes and began to photograph people and inquire about their situations. I began to read anthropology seriously and 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. I started out with the people that I knew best Mimi Webb-Miller, Bill Stevens, Hallie Stillwell, Johhny Newell, and others but the project soon developed a life of its own. I found that I was expanding my friendships and meeting people I would never have otherwise encountered. The richness of this experience is something that will stay with me forever.

Somewhere along the way I began to photograph the land again. I have come to understand how much the land around us affects the landscape of our lives: how seeing a sunrise every morning affects the rest of our day, how walking alone in a desert canyon after a rainstorm, watching the runoff subside, infuses a fresh spirit in the most unfeeling among us.

The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes noise as auditory chaos and reminds us that unless we live next to a waterfall the countryside is quiet, and that the sounds of nature reduce the tension and anxiety that cities create with their noisy, never-ending commotion. Looking from a solitary one-room adobe toward the circling crown of the Chisos in the evening with the gentle murmur of a desert breeze the only sound establishes without question the accuracy of Tuan's observation.

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