THE TEXICAN
Birdseye views of Texas are even better than you expect.
Jay B. Sauceda, better known as one of the brains and CEO behind the popular Texas Humor web store, has a new book out. It’s not a collection of photos of smiling Texans in some of the prideful T-shirts he’s helped design but a book about what the state looks like from an airplane. It helps that Texas is pretty as hell. And that Sauceda is a trained pilot.
“A Mile Above Texas” is about what we look like from the wings of a single-engine Cessna thousands of feet in the air.
Released by University of Texas Press earlier this month, the 200-page photo book comes with 142 aerial images that Sauceda took in 2015. In all, he would take more than 44,000 images over a nearly 4,000-mile odyssey, logging 36 hours in the air and stopping at 12 airports. His plane makes the odd cameo as a shadow on the ground.
“I used a total of seven of cameras, including a handful of GoPro cameras,” said Sauceda, a La Porte native. “A few times, I would open a window up and shoot with a handheld camera.”
Some of the sights that Sauceda captured might seem mundane on the ground. But in the air, they take on an entirely new meaning.
“I had to remind myself to shoot photos sometimes because I was so in awe of what I was taking in,” Sauceda said.
There’s Surfside, decimated during Hurricane Ike, seen beginning to blossom again almost a decade after disaster. A vast green, wooded wilderness along the border of Texas and Louisiana is another spot of wonder. An oil field in Perryton, at the edge of the Panhandle, humming with profits, creates a patchwork design on a prairie. An Edinburg citrus grove looks almost painted by man. And there are solitary homes on the outskirts of farmland as well as shrimp boats in the middle of Matagorda Bay.
“I really didn’t have a goal to photograph anything in particular. I knew where I was going and landing, but outside of that, I wanted to cruise around and see what I could find,” Sauceda said, mentioning that he listened to a classic Texas honky-tonk playlist during his travels.
Rick Bass from Texas Monthly, who chronicled Sauceda’s journey first in April 2017, has even compared the collection of photos to T.R. Fehrenbach’s epic Texas history book “Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans” for its fresh, breath-taking views of a familiar landscape.
“That’s a pretty lofty compliment,” Sauceda said. “I grew up enjoying that book, too.”
Sauceda’s photo book is the kind that you don’t
download onto your tablet but one that gets a prominent place on the coffee table next to copies of a Willie Nelson autobiography. Sauceda wants people to devour this book with their eyes.
“I tell people that we think of ourselves as conquerors of the Earth, but at the height I flew, I discovered how much nature still dictates what we do,” Sauceda said.