Take a Photo, Win A Prize
May 29, 2016
Where was this photo taken? And how does the bayou look there now?
Somewhere on Buffalo Bayou. Photo by Geoff Winningham prior to 2001.
Okay, it’s not difficult. It’s in Geoff Winningham’s beautiful book of black-and-white photographs of Buffalo Bayou. Winningham, who teaches photography at Rice University, spent five years from 1997 to 2001 chronicling Buffalo Bayou from its beginning in the Katy Prairie to its end in Galveston Bay. The book, Along Forgotten River, published in 2003, includes accounts of early travelers in Texas from 1767 to 1858. The book can be purchased here.
Send us your shot of this location on Buffalo Bayou as it looks now. We’ll publish the best of what we get and send the winner a Save Buffalo Bayou bumper sticker.
We’re going to make this a regular series so keep looking.
… Often along these shady banks have I rowed my little skiff and wondered if ever some Bard had consecrated its border shades by a correspondent flow of song … — J.C Clopper’s Journal and Book of Memoranda for 1828, Province of Texas, quoted in Along Forgotten River by Geoff Winningham.
The difficulty on this one is that years after this book was published, all of the trees were ripped out as part of the “improvement” of the bayou. There is actually nowhere between Shepherd and Sabine that has this much vegetation anymore. I paddle this bayou weekly, and I still had to look through my copy of the book to find the location.