J. Griffis Smith - On the Road with Texas Highways: A Tribute to True Texas

FOREWORD: THE LIGHT WAITS FOR NO ONE

In the years Ive worked with photographer Griff Smith, Ive seen his photography influence my experience of events as well as shape my memories of them.

One example is the day I drove through fire.

My vehicles tires had not actually touched the flames, but I could see the firefighters working feverishly right up to the very edge of the Interstate 20 access road, and the emergency vehicles patrolled slowly nearby. Smoke billowed across the highway in voluminous white clouds so thick that I couldnt see through the swirling mass at times, and I slowed the vehicle to 20 mph or less to navigate safely.

It was a Saturday morning in mid-April, but months of debilitating drought and a persistently vicious high-pressure weather system had transmogrified much of Texas into a dusty, parched ghost of its former geographic self. The landscape almost seemed to ache, as if suffering through the last painful weeks of a brutal summer rather than luxuriating in the first lush weeks of spring. Needless to say, no bluebonnets or red-and-yellow firewheels decorated the harsh roadside landscape. At the time, I could see scarcely any vegetation and no natural color at all to offset the brick red of the clay earth and the orange of the fire.

It was during that afternoon that Griff Smith made one of my favorite photographs. And it is a favorite image of mine for reasons that do not generally describe an outstanding photograph. Because, in this case, the memories were highly personal rather than objective. And the subject made it more of a snapshot than an artistic image or a documentary wonder. Even though the characteristics of the photographic image itself were, and still remain, significant because of my personal reaction to the context, that doesnt change my appreciation of the image or the memory of the day.