Book of the photographs of Guy Gillette captures decades of ranch life in small-town East Texas

Via Cowboys and Indians magazine

Guy Gillette

A new book of the photographs of Guy Gillette captures decades of ranch life in small-town East Texas.

by Dana Joseph

Photos from A Family of the Land: The Texas Photography of Guy Gillette, University of Oklahoma Press.

Guy Gillette liked to tell a good story, whether it was on stage in his younger days as an actor or behind the camera during his long career as a famed photojournalist. By the time Gillette died last August at age 90, his images had appeared in high-profile magazines, books, and exhibitions. He had covered the Korean War, the civil rights movement, and Vietnam War protests. And he had photographed countless celebrities, including Elvis Presley, Audrey Hepburn, Queen Elizabeth II, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

But it was in ordinary country living in rural Houston County, Texas, that Gillette found some of the best stories through his viewfinder. Decades of photographs he took there dating from the 1940s are the subject of the new book A Family of the Land: The Texas Photography of Guy Gillette.

Arnolds, Cafe, Lovelady, Texas, 1956



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Gillette came to know the Piney Woods of Southeast Texas by way of New York. Born in Minneapolis, he initially wanted to become an actor and moved to New York to pursue the stage. While a student at the Michael Chekhov Acting Studio, he got work as a busboy at a vegetarian diner, where he met Doris Porter, an aspiring fashion designer from Texas supporting herself waiting tables. The two fell in love, married, and soon began a long series of summer trips from their home in New York to Doris’ family ranch in Houston County.

Gillette had taken up photography as a hobby, and he found the Porter Place — the ranch Doris’ father, Hoyt Porter, had assembled as a young man — and the neighboring small towns of Crockett and Lovelady great ground for practicing the kind of unassuming picture-taking that would become the hallmark of his work. Seeing those early images, a friend in New York encouraged Gillette to follow photography.
    
“In a good photograph, something happens,” Gillette once said, and in Houston County, there was always something happening to train his lens on. On Saturdays, folks turned out to walk around town. There were domino games at the garage. Church homecomings and Bible school. Boot shining and porch conversations. Potlucks and hymn sings. And there was all that went with ranch work and the schooling of Gillette’s two young sons — Guy Porter and Pipp (they would grow up to make award-winning cowboy music as the Gillette Brothers) — in working cattle and riding horses. There were quiet times of cooking breakfast on the range and of cooling off at the water hole. And every now and then there was an emergency, like a tense trip to the vet when a favorite cow dog got its leg broken.
Edward Steichen, who was reportedly moved to tears by an image of a young Guy Jr. looking into the eyes of his injured dog on the vet’s table, chose two of Gillette’s images for the famous Family of Man exhibition. But if some saw art in his photographs, Gillette saw simple, true stories. “Though photography is often called art,” he said, “I have wanted to be artless: to be a documentarian, not an artist.”

Asked to describe what photography meant to him, Gillette struggled for a pithy explanation. If he had a philosophy, he held with the French photographer Brassaï: “I do not look for exceptional subjects. I avoid them,” Gillette said. “I think it is daily life that is the great event, the true reality.”
Telling the simple truth of those stories occupied Gillette his entire life. “It is why I have enjoyed watching the people of Houston County, seeing them through a camera’s viewfinder.”

A Family of the Land: The Texas Photography of Guy Gillette (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013) by Andy Wilkinson is available at www.oupress.com.

http://www.cowboysindians.com/Cowboys-Indians/April-2014/Guy-Gillette/

Guy Gillette 1922 - 2013: "In a good photograph, something happens”

Via Country Life Daily News

Famed photojournalist Guy Gillette Sr.  passed away on Monday, Aug. 19, 2013, just two months shy of his 91st birthday.

Over 50 years in the photojournalism industry, Gillette created a portfolio of art that remains in circulation today. His work has graced the pages and covers of Fortune, Harper’s Bazaar, Life, the New York Times, just to name a few. His work includes images of Jacqueline Kennedy, Elvis Presley, Audrey Hepburn and Queen Elizabeth, and was featured in the 1955 landmark “The Family of Man” photography exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Gillette’s works remain in high demand today, as galleries and movie studios routinely request the use of his images.
A coffee table book, written by Andy Wilkinson, about the work of Gillette is being published by the University of Oklahoma Press this month. Through his research Wilkinson visits the history of Houston County as seen through the eyes of Guy Gillette, Sr. This book utilizes the pictures that Gillette took on his father-in-law’s ranch in Lovelady and around Houston County in the 1940s. The pictures not only document ranching in East Texas but small-town life, like Sunday School, homecoming dinners and Saturdays downtown. It was these pictures that would open the doors in New York for Guy Gillette, Sr. to become a celebrated photojournalist.

Guy Gillette, Sr. is the father of national cowboy personalities and Camp Street Cafe owners, Guy and Pip Gillette.

Arnolds, Cafe, Lovelady, Texas, 1956

“The years of the 30s through the 70s were great years for magazine photography and for us, the photographers, who contributed,” Gillette had said. 

Actor, author, and photographer, Gillette saw the United States evolve through wars, shifting perspectives of culture, and a changing, exciting panoply of heroes — leaders of government, icons of film and theater, and mavens from the corporate world.
 

"In a good photograph, something happens,” Gillette sad. From his photograph of a gravely ill Jacqueline Susann in a limo, whisked from engagement to engagement, to his quickly caught shot of President Eisenhower at a state dinner being patted on his bald pate, there is action.

 Gillette on Salvatore Dali: "I thought Dali was a bore. Always trying to look deadpan. He sought to eliminate all emotion from his public façade. I remember he flirted a great deal with the woman who was writing his profile, saying she reminded him of a Northern Italian blonde. He refused to speak English to us, even though he spoke some. Neither the writer nor I came away very happy with him."

Trained as an actor, Guy Gillette’s stage career was halted by induction into the World War II Army. After the war, now a budding photographer, Gillette, the former actor, was sympathetic to artists such as the choreographer Agnes DeMille, who allowed him to photograph her for Dance Magazine, as she created a ballet. Photos of Audrey Hepburn, Marian Anderson, Sarah Vaughn, Elvis Presley and Rogers and Hammerstein followed. A highlight of his career is a photograph of Henri Cartier-Bresson, taken by Gillette as both photographers competed for a shot of a nun at a St, Patrick’s Day Parade, leading the notoriously camera-shy Cartier-Bresson to admonish Gillette, “Photographers NEVER photograph photographers.”

Monroe Gallery of Photography will feature a very special tribute exhibition of Guy Gillette's photographs in November/December. Contact the gallery for further information.

GUY GILLETTE FEATURED IN BLACK & WHITE MAGAZINE: "He is an enormous contributor to photographic history"

Issue 73
March, 2010

Guy Gillette loves a story, and he has collected plenty of them in his 86 years. A photojournalist for over half a century, Gillette's work has taken him around the world photographing news, culture, celebrity, and daily life. Gillette is a people person, and he relishes the tales behind the pictures, the rich back-story to a life in photography, such as the time he captured camera-shy Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the photographer admonished him" "Photographers NEVER photograph photographers!" U. S. Camera found the photograph charming enough to run it full-page in a feature on Gillette's work.

Born in Minnesota, Gillette had a brief flirtation with photography as a boy, but decided in high school to become an actor. After an apprenticeship at the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, he moved to New York City, attending the Chekhov Actors Studio on a scholarship. He met his wife, Doris, while moonlighting in a restaurant. Gillette finally got a part in the Broadway comedy "Junior Miss" but his budding stage career was not meant to be. The year was 1942. There was a war on, and barely three months into the part Gillette was drafted and sent to Ft. Dix to train as an army combat medic. When, after eight months, it was discovered that he had vision problems, he was given an honorable discharge and headed back to Manhattan, and for a while, resumed his acting career, appearing in a play under the direction of Antoinette Perry.

Photography reentered Gillette's life when a magazine editor who had seen his photographs of Texas offered him an assignment. Gillette didn't miss a beat, borrowed money to buy a camera, and pleased with the results, resolved to become a professional photographer. He studied with Sid Grossman of the Photo League for two years. Soon he was working for magazines such as Fortune, Life, Harper Bazaar, Theater Arts, and This week, where his images appeared on countless covers.

Gillette's love of the grease-paint and simpatico with actors combined with his photographic skills to make him a formidable shooter of the arts scene. He created intimate portraits of actors, directors, producers, and writers, such as Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Sarah Vaughn, and events such as the gala opening night of Lincoln Center with backstage images of a triumphant Leonard Bernstein greeting well wishers. Gillette acknowledges his instinct for the theater has a positive impact on his photography. "Because of the moment," he says. "You are always building to some kind of moment as an actor. In photography, there was a moment when someone would do something or have a certain expression that I would say "That's it!'".

Although he never saw action during World War II, Gillette spent three months at the front during the Korean War shooting stories for the Red Cross: troops in combat, a Navy hospital ship, and an Army MASH unit. His Korean work received much acclaim, including the Missouri's School of Journalism award for best picture story. Edward Steichen likes the work so much he wrote a letter to the Red Cross praising it. This was not the first time Steichen had noticed Gillette's work. Two of Gillette's photographs - "Texas Family", a portrait of three generations of Doris' family on a porch swing, and one of his two sons "Playing Train" - were featured prominently in the landmark exhibition Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, and the accompanying book. Both Texas and family have figured prominently in Gillette's work, and his frequent visits there became photographic explorations that provided him a rich counterpoint to his New York images.

He later moved from editorial to commercial work, which often sent him as far away as Asia, Europe, and Australia. No stranger to politics, he photographed the Civil Rights movement and March on Washington to the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the Sixties, and his portfolio boasts many political figures of the day, from Queen Elizabeth II to President Eisenhower.

Gillette has won many awards for both is editorial and commercial work and has had several solo exhibitions in the U. S. and Europe, including a recent retrospective at the Hudson River Museum in 2006. His photographs are held in both public and private collections. He has one book, a children's book, Simpson.

People have always been at the center of Gillette's photography, whether a lovely shot of three girls on an Atlanta street or a young nurse cradling a soldier's head in Korea. He is an enormous contributor to photographic history. All the world is Gillette's stage, and he has had great fun recounting the players and their stories.

--Shawn O'Sullivan
©Black & White Magazine

Print Information:
Gelatin silver prints, 11 x 14 and 16 x 20 inches. $900 - $2,000.

Contact Information:
MONROE GALLERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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Santa Fe, NM 87501
505.992.0800
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Arnold's Cafe, Lovelady, Texas, 1956

Ojibway girl gathering rice, Northern Minnesota, 1958

Morning salute to the Flag, Vacation bible school, Antioch, Texas, 1955

Rainy day in Fredricksburg, Virginia, 1948

New friend, old church, Staten Island, New York, 1949

Dutch girl, Staten Island, New York, 1961

See more of Guy Gillette's photography here.