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In
2003, I began to photograph
Vidor,
Texas. Originally from the
Midwest
and having lived most of my adult
years in the Northeast, I had heard that Vidor was a "Klan
Town" and was curious to learn
what, exactly, constituted such a place. What I found was not at all what I
had expected.
A
small rural community in the Southeast corner of
Texas, Vidor is a complex place: on the
one hand it is hospitable, tight-knit and fiercely, wonderfully,
independent. And yet the town is also a deeply suspicious place bordering
on the paranoid. Despite its many complexities, there is no doubt that it is
a community of absolutely remarkable resiliency and homespun inventiveness.
As the town attempts to move beyond its past, its pride combined with the
everyday fact of living with a permanent kind of American poverty, makes the
journey a difficult one.
Through
these photographs I hope to provide a psychological landscape of Vidor: a
place, which, despite its many flaws, always shows a rough kind of beauty.
-Dave
Anderson, 2007
At the age of 9, Dave Anderson
began photographing with a Kodak Instamatic camera. After working in various
fields ranging from being a member of President Bill Clinton¹s staff to
working at an independent movie studio, he took-up photography full-time
after participating in a course at the
International
Center
for Photography (ICP) in
New
York City
.
Named a “Rising Star” by Photo
District News in 2004,
Anderson
received the 2005
Santa
Fe
Center
for Photography Project Competition prize for his series Rough
Beauty.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at
ClampArt in NYC, the Griffin Museum in Winchester, MA; the Stephen Wirtz
Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; and, in 2008, at the Museum of Contemporary
Photography in Chicago, Il. Dave has been published in various media
including The New York Times, NPR, Newsweek, British Journal of Photography,
and is in the collection of various museums including the Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, TX; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; the Art Museum of
Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; and the
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA. In fall 2006 Dewi Lewis
Publishing (
UK
)
produced a monograph of his work, entitled Rough
Beauty
with text by Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator of photographs at the
Museum
of
Fine
Art
in
Houston
,
TX
.
For
more information about Anderson visit his website at www.dbanderson.com.
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