Hometown Texas

About the Book

Photographs and stories that explore the people and landscapes of small-town Texas

Book Synopsis

Brown and Holley are interested in place and what makes people who they are. With particular interest in how people take the hand they've been dealt--fate, family, circumstance, luck--and craft a life for themselves, the authors celebrate the grit and gumption of these Texas originals. Introducing quirky characters and tenacious spirits, Holley's stories seek out the personality of the small town while Brown's photographs capture the essence of a changing landscape. Hometown Texas aims not to be nostalgic or sentimental but rather to show readers an unknown Texas--one that, while not vanishing, is certainly on the wane.

Organized into five topographical, geographic, and cultural sections--East, West, North, South, and Central--three dozen stories and more than eighty complementary images work to create a parallel narrative to reveal what Brown has described as the "collective, various, remarkably complex soul that makes Texas unique."

Hometown Texas is an exploration across miles and cultures, of well-traveled roads and forgotten byways, deep into the heart of Texas.

Review Quotes

"Beauty and strangeness is a theme of 'Hometown Texas'. Both writer and photographer see things that most of us drive right past as we buzz through Bigfoot or Martindale or Waxahachie on the way to some place we think is better and more important. If anything, the book will make you think about taking your foot off the gas, in hopes of finding things are not what they seem."-- San Antonio Express-News

About the Author

Peter Brown has photographed landscapes and small towns for twenty-five years. He is the author of Seasons of Light, On the Plains, and West of Last Chance, a collaboration with novelist Kent Haruf that won the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. His work has been collected by the Menil Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, MoMA New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He teaches photography at the Glasscock School at Rice University and lives in Houston.