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Pioneer Big Bend photographer dies
On this day in 1981, photographer W. D. Smithers died in Albuquerque at
the age of eighty-five. Smithers was born in Mexico, where his father
was the bookkeeper for an American mining company. The family moved to
San Antonio in 1905. Smithers dropped out of high school and learned
photography through a volunteer apprenticeship at a local studio. In the
course of his career, most of which he spent in West Texas, Smithers
took more than 9,000 photographs of a wide range of subjects, including
such notables as Katherine Stinson, Pancho Villa, and Will Rogers;
mining in Terlingua; border skirmishes between the United States cavalry
and Mexican raiders; the attempts of the Texas Rangers to control
smuggling; and the wildlife and landscape of the Big Bend. His best work
documents Mexican-American culture in the Big Bend region. Smithers
viewed his camera not as a creative tool, but as an instrument to
document the events he witnessed and the people he met. He summarized
his goals as a photographer in his 1976 autobiography, Chronicles of
the Big Bend: A Photographic Memoir of Life on the Border. Most of
his original negatives and prints are in the Photography Collection of
the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas
at Austin.
- Links to Related Handbook of Texas Online Articles
- SMITHERS, WILFRED DUDLEY
- PHOTOGRAPHY
- GLENN SPRING RAID
- SADA, MARIA G.
- Other Texas Day by Day Articles for This Date
- New fort anchors Texas line of frontier defense (1851)
- San Juan Bautista Mission founded (1699)
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