0.38 Geoff winningham, b. 1943

Stirrings and influence

I came to Houston in the fall of 1961. I was accepted as an undergraduate student at Rice University, thinking at the time I would be an engineering major. At that time Rice didn’t even have an art department, and I certainly didn’t have any thought of pursuing art, even as far as one course. I was an engineering major-to-be, but shortly after I got here I became an English major and developed—or I should say re-developed—an interest in photography that I had first developed as a teenager. My junior year is when my kind of first stirrings about visual art began to happen within me.

I was in an English course and I noticed the professor, Walter Isle, making references to photography—relating them to literature. That was a total new thing to me, because basically I was just a kind of a hobbyist. When he would talk about, for example, poetry and T.S. Eliot and make references to photographs of Walker Evans, it didn’t have any meaning to me, but I pursued it—I followed it up. And so my first interest in art began on the Rice campus, stirred really by English professors.

My first kind of epiphany in the area of photography came when a fellow named Larry McMurtry

Well, I went by a few days later. [The book] was a copy of The Decisive Moment, the Cartier-Bresson book, and I remember opening it and being spellbound for several hours, and going away with the feeling that that was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

The other person that was very important in the developing of my interest in photography and in art in general was Charles Schorre. Schorre taught a kind of free-for-all class that was sponsored by the architecture department, called Drawing and Water Color Rendering. In Schorre’s inimitable way he took it in all directions and took people like me who had never taken an art course and allowed me to take pictures of the class. It just became a really wonderful special problems class where everybody worked and showed together. Schorre became a mentor, a friend. He loaned me copies of Aperture magazine. He loaned me books. He, more than anyone else, made me aware that there was a tradition and history to photography as an art.

Media center

I got out of the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology with my masters degree in the spring of 1968 and right at that time, another English prof who had befriended me and had been a very close friend of mine, Jerry O’Grady, was hired by John de Menil to start a media center at the University of St. Thomas. O’Grady was kind of a disciple of Marshall McLuhan and in his mind one of the great tasks for higher education was to help everyone be aware of how the media worked. So O’Grady was starting this media center with the enthusiastic patronage of John de Menil. I don’t think Dominique was particularly excited about it; she was doing her own thing with her Institute for the Arts. I had an interview with the de Menils in New York in the late spring of 1968 and I was hired.