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John Slaughter
"Day's End." Photograph, 2016.
John Slaughter’s vibrant, saturated photographs of Catahoulas—that’s one of his on the cover of this issue—cemeteries, and small-town places and people capture the beautiful collisions between past and present that make South Louisiana landscapes so evocative. They have earned him a place among the iconic chroniclers of Acadiana in pictures. What, then, to make of his latest book of photographs, all shot in and around Marfa, the flyspeck West Texas town whose oasis-like desert setting and outsized personality have made it ground zero for a certain kind of contemporary art revivalism? “If you drove six hundred miles in any direction [from Acadiana], you wouldn’t find anything more different,” Slaughter said of the far west Texas desert out of which Marfa emerges like a mirage. “The drive out there is a progression—with the trees getting smaller and the skies getting bigger,” he observed. “The sky is a bigger component of any landscape.”
Slaughter and his wife, Hilary, have kept a house in Marfa since 2007. They spend a couple of months there most summers—unbroken time that Slaughter sees as vital to doing justice to the subject matter. “Usually, taking photographs takes me a long time. In my old age I’ve gotten good at figuring out what I want to photograph, then taking a lot of time taking photos of that one thing.”
In Marfa, that one thing is the relationship between the tiny town, and the vast desert that surrounds it. “There’s an oasis feel,” he says. “I’m trying to convey the feeling of the place, but it’s a very unusual environment. You can’t just show up there and expect to get good pictures. You can go months and not get anything. In South Louisiana, I think you can come and get the pictures you want more quickly.”
So what unites the dramatically different landscapes of South Louisiana and West Texas? Slaughter points to the marsh. “Because the marsh is a very horizontal, a very wide open space,” he says. “That’s the one area where there’s a relationship.” Wherever he’s shooting—in saturated South Louisiana or dessicated West Texas—Slaughter embraces new technology to make his photographs as striking as his subject matter. He loves the ongoing evolution of camera technology and his ability to use Photoshop to stitch multiple images together and capture the panoramic grandeur of big sky country. “Some people feel like that’s not honest,” he observes, “But that technology has been very helpful to me. Photographers are in the business of making two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional subjects. They’ve been bending reality forever.”
John Slaughter’s Marfa and the Mystique of Far West Texas, Catahoula: Louisiana State Dog, and other books are available from UL Press (ulpress.org) or Amazon.
This month, John Slaughter will be profiled on LPB’s Art Rocks, the weekly showcase of visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads’ publisher James Fox-Smith. Tune in Friday, January 19, at 8:30 pm, or Saturday, January 20, at 5:30 pm, across the LPB network. lpb.org/artrocks.
