Photos by James H. Evans
Clockwise from top: Shafter Landscape #3,
Freddie and Ocotillo & Stars
the digital panoramic to the Hasselblad square, the full-
bleed to the white-framed. DJ Stout and Julie Savasky
of Pentagram Design in Austin steer the continuity of
the Evans’ work. Having fashioned Big Bend Pictures,
they are intimate with his ideas and visions. Combined
with a gift from the University of Texas Press 2010
Advisory Council, this chronicle shows a dedication to
high standards and aesthetics.
The foreword is authored by Rebecca Solnit, the
acclaimed San Francisco-based writer with 13 books to
her name, including the multi-award-winning River of
Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild
West and more recently A Paradise Built in Hell: The
Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Solnit has
been an independent writer since 1988, the same year
Evans moved to Marathon to commandeer his inde-
pendence as an artist. She is an editing contributor to
Harper’s magazine and contributes to the political site
Tomdispatch.com.
Solnit takes a road trip from San Francisco over the
Sierra to the high desert with the galleys for Crazy from
the Heat playing in her head. “I was west. (Where I come
from, you get there by going east).” As she brings the
galleys from the city to the open spaces, similar yet dif-
ferent from Evans’ environment, her lulling compar-
isons wind through the small towns, the people and the
scenery to complement the images and ponder their
place in this society. Solnit writes in the foreword, aptly
titled “Dirt and Light,” “I wouldn’t argue that rustic life
is simpler or better – only different, very different. The
very textures in James Evans’s pictures speak: the cases
of soda and the old hot-water-tank boiler on the back
veranda with the boys on the trampoline, the way skin
ages in the dry broil of the air as though people over
time become closer to reptiles, the ubiquitous dust and
the spectacular space.”
I find myself thumbing back to images that make me
a little uncomfortable – maybe the nude in the sand or
the deer in the tinaja. How about Shirley’s fried pie
exploding in grease? Like a cholla, these images stick in
a different place when you try to pull one out, and you
wonder why you stepped there in the first place. Still,
there is a respectful approach to the nudes and an hon-
ored quality to the critters that keep you fingering the
192 pages. Next time, on a float through Santa Elena
Canyon, the top of the walls will seem different. And of
course, I sigh with awe at the phenomenal portraits –
crying for the time not spent with Monte Schatz and
wishing to hear the laughter of Jesse Gonzales.
I will miss the “Notes and Stories” found in Evans’
first book. You may need to go there and find Ezekiel
Hernandez’ bedroom to learn about the ghillie suit. In
Crazy from the Heat, there are no dates by the titles – not
even an index: You are only given a 20-year span. As a
novel abandons the conventions of normal chronology,
the images jump from one idea to the next and then
back again, emulating the evolution and production of
ideas, using the camera as a journal. Says Evans of his
work, “I don’t necessarily create anything new but recy-
cle ideas through my imagination.”
A shuttle in a loom, a needle in cloth, creating a
timeless story of people and nature, night and day.
Quilting small ideas into larger ones. Their use meas-
ured by how the edges are worn.
Cenizo
Second Quarter 2011
13