When Brandon Thibodeaux takes a portrait for his personal work, it usually starts with a conversation and maybe even a little alcohol.
That was the case with a prized portrait from his 2017 book, “In That Land of Perfect Day,” which shows the lives of people he met in Mississippi's Delta region, where he spent extended periods of time beginning in 2009 to immerse himself in the rural African American experience.
Here’s the story behind the picture. Thibodeaux was visiting his friend, Choo Choo, who lived with his friend, Nut, in Alligator, Mississippi. Choo Choo had a weathered trunk in a lean-to shed where he kept things he considered precious, such as books.
“We had all been spending that day in the yard drinking vodka, catching up, listening to music and generally watching the day slip away when we got the idea of doing a portrait with his books,” Thibodeaux said.
Choo Choo said he knew the perfect one — a handsome Bible with gold leaf on the edges. He wanted to dress appropriately and ran inside to get a sport coat. They shot some photos in nearby fields, but Thibodeaux wasn’t totally satisfied with the background.
Just before all that, Nut’s wife, Shelley, had washed a comforter and put it outside to dry.
“In a last-ditch effort, I thought: ‘Let’s try the clothesline,’” he said. “Maybe it’ll be different.”
And it was. The large comforter hung like a theater curtain, framing a man filled with pride and dignity as he sat with his chin up and shoulders squared on that day in 2012. When Choo Choo died, his son asked if he could use that photo in the funeral service pamphlet for his father.
“That caused it to be the most prized for me — the idea that it was a medium for a father’s legacy to his son,” Thibodeaux said, adding: “It was like being anointed.”
Thibodeaux, who creates portraits in the documentary tradition as he explores life in the American South, will curate the SE Center for Photography’s upcoming Portrait show, scheduled to open Nov. 6.
He doesn’t want to limit submissions to a particular style or approach. But, given the turmoil and uncertainty of this year, he challenges photographers to create portraits of those who inspire and fill them with hope.
And he believes any person can do that: “If that’s a strong character on the corner of the block you walk past every day or the leader of the church or the 90-year-old man who sits on his porch and waves at you. We can find inspiration in people around us all the time.”
While Thibodeaux tends to make portraits of people in their surroundings, he welcomes work done anywhere, from a backyard to a studio. He’s looking for classic visual elements, such as strong composition and lighting. But he’s also looking for an image’s ability to convey a message and create a connection or emotional response between the viewer and the person in the photograph.
“There’s a stirring that happens,” he said.
When Thibodeaux takes portraits for his personal projects, he uses a Mamiya C330 medium-format camera with a waist-level viewfinder, which requires him to look down to compose and focus. He knows most people are used to cameras at eye level, with the photographer quickly snapping away. He also knows people like to pose themselves and do it automatically.
But the Mamiya is slow to focus, which means it can take Thibodeaux a little time to get the shot he wants. As the seconds pass, the subject tends to drop what may be a contrived pose. “And that’s generally when the photograph is taken,” he said.
But taking photos of people isn’t necessarily easy for Thibodeaux, who is soft-spoken and appears somewhat shy. It can be hard for him to initiate a portrait. And he feels the weight of representing his subjects with context, purpose and fairness.
“There’s an intimidation factor to shooting portraits, especially people you’re just meeting on the street that might have an interesting look or you gravitate to in conversation,” he said.
Thibodeaux also will teach a Zoom workshop, “Weaving Narrative and Plotting Course,” for the SE Center over three consecutive Saturdays in November, beginning Nov. 7. It’s aimed at photographers who have a project underway or one in mind. He’ll review a photographer’s images with the goal of molding them into a finished body of work. He’ll also discuss how to develop story lines, find an audience, talk about the work’s importance and prepare an artist’s statement.
“The most powerful work is the work that you feel most passionate about, that you identify with and you can speak about and moves you,” he said. “And with that, you’re setting the stage for the viewer to experience that same passion.”
Thibodeaux comes to photography from a circuitous route and a landslide of serendipity. It starts his junior year in high school in Beaumont, Texas, when he was diagnosed with lymphoma, a cancer that affects the infection-fighting cells in the immune system. By age 18, he had been treated for stage 4 non-Hodgkins lymphoma at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. With all his exposure to medical procedures, he figured he’d be a doctor and enrolled at the Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, Texas.
But that plan lasted only one semester. After receiving below average grades, his parents brought him back home to Beaumont to attend nearby Lamar University. During his second semester, he needed an elective and his roommate suggested a photography course his uncle taught.
His uncle is Keith Carter, a fine art photographer known for his black-and-white medium format work. Carter’s first book, “From Uncertain to Blue,” was a documentary-style exploration through small Texas towns with quirky names, including the two in his book’s title.
Thibodeaux signed up for the class without any idea how well-respected Carter was in field: “We didn’t know Keith from beans until he would take us to the fine art museum in Houston and people would clamor for his autograph.”
Unlike pre-med, photography was a natural fit for this cancer survivor who used to spend his free time exploring the streets of Beaumont just to see what he could see. By using a camera, he could channel his curiosity into artistic expression. Even his aunt, Elyse Thibodeaux, who worked as a secretary for the Beaumont Examiner, noticed. She was so impressed she got him his first gig shooting Friday night football for the weekly tabloid.
Thibodeaux used a Canon Rebel with a 50 mm lens, a film camera his grandparents gave him. One night during a game, he met a woman who had watched him work. She was Margaret Toal, an editor at the Orange Leader, a paper with a circulation of 8,000 in a neighboring town. She offered him an assignment he couldn’t refuse.
“She said: ‘Well, if you can shoot the Lions carnival Saturday and knock it out of the park, I’ll give you a job,’” he recalled. “And I did.”
He worked for the Leader for two and a half years in what he described as a bootcamp for photojournalists. A day might include shooting a kindergarten classroom at 9 a.m., a homicide at noon and a basketball game at 7:30 p.m. But he did well and the editor suggested he study photojournalism at her alma mater, the University of North Texas in Denton.
That was another turning point. His professor there was Mona Reeder, who also was a staff photographer at the Dallas Morning News. He described her as inspiring, tough for her work in conflict zones and “just bad to the bone,” a high compliment.
Reeder instilled in Thibodeaux the importance of building a visual narrative.
Carter, his first teacher, steered him to value photography as a kind of visual poetry beyond documenting a scene — and to use it as an external expression of his internal feelings. To this day, Thibodeaux can recite a quote Carter had over his classroom’s door by the writer Ellen Gilchrist:
“We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.”
Both teachers had their students reading books on spirituality and Eastern philosophy. Think “Journey to Ixtlan,” an account of a Yaqui shaman by Carlos Castaneda, and “Zen and the Art of Archery,” with music from the Grateful Dead playing in the background.
“I felt like those two were my photo parents early on,” he said, adding he also was influenced by documentary giants such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastiao Salgado, W. Eugene Smith, Eugene Richards and August Sander.
Reeder also helped him get an internship at the Dallas paper, where he worked with about 20 staff photographers. After he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in photojournalism, he decided the quickest way to start a career was to freelance. He based himself in Dallas, a fast-growing region with a diverse economy and low overhead. “There was a lot of work to be had,” he said.
But a couple of things caused him to change his focus a few year later in 2009. President Barack Obama had just been inaugurated and Thibodeaux wanted to explore Black America as a photojournalist, to find a place to really get to know. The Delta region of the Mississippi caught his attention with its history of blues music, agriculture and civil rights.
During a stopover in Memphis, he asked a couple of police officers on Beale Street if they knew of any nice places in the Delta. They recommended Clarksdale, Mississippi.
This dot on a map became his destination. He drove home to Dallas to pick up a paycheck and headed for Clarksdale the next day. He slept in his car for a couple of nights and started checking out towns, cycling around until he had a series of chance encounters.
“It could have easily gone another way and I’d just go home with a couple rolls of film and nothing to it,” he said. “But fortunately … I fell in with one family in particular that really took to me and kind of shepherded me through the region and introduced me to a number of folks.”
There were other things typical of rural life that resonated with him: reliance on the land and faith as a support system. Early on, he attended a church service on what turned out to be Father’s Day. It turned into a moving experience that gave him the feeling he was where he needed to be and hearing what he needed to hear.
“That set me on the path,” he said “It was sort of a spiritual journey guided by the kindness of people living around me.”
As he grounded himself in the Delta, his relationships with local families deepened. He was there to participate in birthdays, holidays and regular days: “ … take kids to school, stay up late, talk shop, speak about romance and loss and all of those things.”
He also was there to photograph as children grew, parents got older and grandparents became frail. They got used to him shooting pictures between beers or after church. And he remembered anecdotes for every shot. That’s when the idea of a book, with space to include words as well, made sense for the totality of what he wanted to convey.
“It’s not about making a mind-blowing photo, saying, ‘Ah, ha! I can do Cartier-Bresson and the decisive moment,’” he said. “It’s about relating a message and a story and having a narrative.”
“In That Land of Perfect Day,” published by Red Hook Editions in Brooklyn, New York, presents 128 pages of poetic images over eight years. It provides context, but doesn’t tell viewers what to think or feel. The best part was that the people in the photographs told him they appreciated the book.
Thibodeaux had to return to Dallas now and then to do freelance assignments to keep the Delta project financially afloat. His clients included corporations such as Shell Oil and editorial publications, including The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Mother Jones.
Two years ago, he and his wife, Brittany, who grew up in Mississippi, moved to Houston in part to be closer to his family. There, he does creative commissions and assignments. He’s also a guest instructor at the Santa Fe Workshops, the Maine Media Workshops, the Houston Center for Photography and the Los Angeles Center of Photography.
In other recognition, his work is included in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
In January, he did something completely different from his documentary work. Using a friend as a model, he shot 30 rolls of film over seven days in southern Louisiana to illustrate “Evangeline,” an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published in 1847. Now entwined in the state’s folklore, the poem tells the tale of a young woman’s search for her love after they were separated during the British deportation of Acadians.
“So much of my work is telling the stories of other people and not solely relying upon my imagination,” he said “So it’s really exciting.”
Recently, he’s been researching the looming eviction crisis as people lose jobs during the pandemic as a potential story, but hasn’t figured out his next big thing. At some point, he’d like to do another book.
On a very positive note, Thibodeaux, 39, has remained cancer free.
“I’m more or less for lack of a better word totally cured until something else pops up and I find myself in another sticky situation,” he said, adding he’s doing what he can to minimize his risk of catching the coronavirus.
With 15 years of experience, Thibodeaux now sees himself as an educator. He wants to share what he knows, perhaps be a young shooter’s “photo parent” or maybe just reinforce the idea that photographers don’t have to go out into the world to create compelling images. They just have to be able to see the world within their own backyards.
Images © Brandon Thibodeaux
WEAVING NARRATIVE AND PLOTTING COURSE- ZOOM WORKSHOP with BRANDON THIBODEAUX
