to talk, he said, “You know, when I
was a boy growing up in Wharton,”
which was a tiny agricultural town in
Texas, “I told a teacher I wanted to be
an actor or an artist.
He said, ‘Horton, that’s going to be
difficult in this community, but you
need to know a few things.’”
I’m paying attention at this point.
“‘You have to know the history of
the medium you want to work in.’” I
thought, “Yeah, I kind of know that.”
Then he said the teacher told him,
“‘You also have to be a product of your
own time. You don’t want to act or
write plays the same way people have
always done ‘em, you want to do them
in your generational way.’” I thought,
“Yeah, I kind of know that too.”
Then Foote said, “I went to New
York, and I went to other places, and
I had some success, but I learned that
for me that wasn’t enough.”
Then there was this pause, and
Foote said, “For me, I learned I had to
belong to a place.”
And when he said that, it was like
being struck by lightning. I just sat up
straight in my opera seat and thought,
“Oh geez, why is it that I think I have
to go all around the world to make a
photograph that somebody is going
to look at? Why don’t I just try and
belong to my place that most peo-
ple make fun of? Why don’t I learn
the legends? Why don’t I learn the
mythology? Why don’t I learn about
the communities?”I went home so invigorated,
and that’s when things started
to change. I felt like, “I’m going
to belong to this place for better
or worse.” I still travel widely,
but what I found is when I go
somewhere, I basically take my
own place with me. It was a
wonderful epiphany.And up until that point,
you were shooting pretty
straight portraits?
I was doing my own work as
well, but what I was doing—
at that time there wasn’t that
much shown, especially in my
region—I was learning from
books. So, whomever’s book I
got a hold of, I would wittingly
or unwittingly emulate them.
So for a while, I became Walker
Evans or Joel-Peter Witkin. But
then after leaving the opera
house, I thought, “OK, all bets
are off. Let ‘em make fun, here’s
what I’m gonna do.”
I just started photographing
things like dead coyotes hang-
ing on barbed wire in a rice
field, a raven in a tree or some
poor bedraggled hound dog on
a dirt road.How would these end up
having a surreal feel to them?
Your images are pathways into a
dream world.
“Photography is not about the thing
photographed. It is about how that
thing looks photographed.” That’s a
Garry Winogrand quote.
When I start a project, I look at
someb ody’s work t hat’s similar, just to
see how things look.
I read a quote by poet Wallace Ste-
vens where he said, “Poetry must resist
the intelligence almost successfully.”
I have that on my darkroom wall.
(When I read something about poetry,
I change it to the word “photography.”)
There are times to trust your intuition
and not overthink things.
Early on, I fell in love with the“Conversation with a Coyote,” 2014 digitalphotopro.com November/December 2019 | 17