FREEZE FRAME
PHOTOGRAPHER CAPTURES HOUSTON
No image can possibly contain all of Houston and yet, when I look at “Flipping Boy,” a photograph by Earlie Hudnall Jr. that was taken — or “made,” as he says — in 1983, I think it comes close.
It’s a singular moment. A row of modest wooden homes, one with clothes hanging high to dry, recedes behind an aging pickup that obscures the precise moment when the landscape jolts from a neighborhood to an imposing wall of skyscrapers — adorned, of course, with a ubiquitous necklace of utility lines. A young girl in shorts stands on the sidewalk, her eyes toward us, the viewers peering decades later through the camera’s eye, but the excitement is before her, before us, in the middle of the street: a boy, mid-back-flip, his fingers splayed on the asphalt, his bare feet moving just fast enough to blur.
The viewer knows that in one world — our world — right after Hudnall captured the image, the boy landed back on his feet. The black-and-white photograph itself opens the possibility of another world — one where the boy wasn’t just flipping, but taking flight.
French photographer Henri CartierBresson called that instant when all the chaos of the world aligned harmoniously in balance the “decisive moment.” There is a rhythm to life and the best photographers are in tune with it, able to anticipate the way the world moves — disjointed one moment and beautifully connected the next.
Hudnall is one of those photographers. When he came to Houston in 1968, as so many young Black would-be artists did, he went to Texas Southern University, ready to draw and paint under the tutelage of Dr. John Biggers. Instead, photography found him. Over the next 50 years, he would go on to shape how we see neighborhoods such as Acres Homes, Third Ward and Fourth Ward, where he photographed the flipping boy.
His photographs do far more than document these areas, long desired by real estate interests and dominated by landlords, and long the subject of those who wish to “discover” and “preserve” the heritage of African Americans. Through his steady and unassuming lens, he gifts all of Houston with an alternative to the relentlessness of redevelopment, in all its profit-driven and government-supported manifestations.
Brought together for an exhibition at Art League Houston and recognized with a lifetime achievement award, Hudnall’s images are more relevant than ever. For decades now, there has been a fight for the fate of so many urban Black neighborhoods. Fourth Ward, in particular, has served as a sort of warning. Communities have had to resist not only exploitation, degradation and speculation at the hands of city elites, they have also had to negotiate their own commodification by those who speak of the cultural value of certain historic neighborhoods, and much less often of the people.
Everyone, it seems, saw something they wanted in Fourth Ward. Its story of gentrification at the right and left hands of government and business has become the narrative of Houston development, setting the stage for the same sort of transformations elsewhere.
But Hudnall, who developed a sort of rapport with his subjects and who kept showing up year after year, simply saw Fourth Ward and the many neighborhoods he’s spent time in. Because of that, his work shows the people themselves with unparalleled intimacy and resists the temptation to imagine places without people, particularly Black people.
“This was in the stars,” Hudnall, 76, told me about his lifelong career. We had never talked before, but I had known of Hudnall for years, the Gordon Parks of Houston. He had even taken my motherin-law’s wedding photos.
Hudnall is a wiry man and in videos and interviews, he always seems to be
cradling his camera, even in the rare moments when it’s not there. He has soft eyes and a broad smile that disappear each time his bald head dips down to peer through the viewfinder of his camera.
“Excuse me, sir. If you don’t mind,” he says in one video interview on the streets of Fourth Ward, stopping midsentence to take a photograph of a man with a mop heading into the Queen of Sheba Grand Chapter, Order of Eastern Star of Texas Inc. “Hold it please, sir,” he tells the man as he kneels down and gets the photograph.
Over four decades and counting, and with work in the Smithsonian, Hudnall has traveled the world with his camera and Art League visitors can see examples of his work from across the globe. His style can be compared to that of Roy DeCarava, Manuel Álvarez Bravo or Cartier-Bresson.
“They’re these flâneur photographers who just kind of walk around as observers and capture these images, make these images,” Jimmy Castillo, the former director of exhibitions and curatorial projects at Art League, said.
Castillo worked with Hudnall to curate the current exhibition that spans decades and continents. But Hudnall’s photographs of Houston communities stand out as particularly essential.
When Hudnall tells the story of discovering photography, he often begins back in Mississippi when his high school physics teacher demonstrated the difference between a physical and chemical process by developing film. Hudnall went on to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam, camera in hand, before heading to Texas Southern University in 1968 where he studied under Dr. John Biggers and Caroll Simms. Under their watch, the art program bloomed out across the city and world at the same time the university itself expanded its reach and significance. There his first serious photographic works in Houston would put him at the center of an unfolding story about the city.
It was a particular moment, not just in Houston history, but American history.
At the height of late ’60s turmoil and ambition, President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty supported long-neglected urban areas, in part, through the Model Cities program. From the federal perspective, Model Cities would be a sort of corrective to the Urban Renewal era. Instead of demolishing neighborhoods to build highways or sterile federal housing, the government invested in existing communities. But it represented something much different to Mayor Louie Welch, who saw it instead as a way to wrest control of federal dollars from a growing grassroots movement of activists, according to historian Wesley G. Phelps, and who was much more interested in
feeding the Houston growth machine. Welch was “the consummate hometown booster,” Mimi Swartz once wrote in Texas Monthly, and he was bankrolled by “the city’s power brokers — the builders, the contractors, the bankers, and the real estate developers.”
Into this tangle of power, place and profit, Hudnall was assigned to document some of the neighborhoods that were supposed to benefit from the Model Cities program, including historic Mexican American and Black communities, with which he found a quick kinship. It was a first foray that would extend for decades as Hudnall returned again and again, to see what few others seemed to: what was actually there.
It was none other than the esteemed Dr. Thomas F. Freeman who picked Hudnall for the Model Cities gig. The minister, debate coach and educator was also the Model Cities Training Center director at TSU from 1970 to 1973. Under his direction, Hudnall and classmate and fast friend Ray Carrington III gathered images for twice weekly community meetings held on campus that were intended to help keep residents involved and apprised of the program’s progress across the city.
In addition to Fourth Ward and its Freedmen’s Town, he went to Sunnyside, Trinity Gardens, Third Ward and Fifth Ward. They reminded him of his childhood home in Hattiesburg, Miss.
“I fell in love with it,” Hudnall said.
Back in Hattiesburg, his father was an amateur photographer and his grandmother, Miss Bonnie Jean, had served as the community storyteller. Hudnall fondly recalls fishing with her and enjoying her homemade ice cream and jellies. In the afternoons and evenings, Hudnall and his five brothers and sisters would visit her next door where they would listen to her stories. The unofficial community historian documented everything in her albums of photographs and detailed notes about important goings on.
Hudnall sees his role in a similar way.
In Freedmen’s Town, he learned about how the neighborhood was settled by former slaves, how highway 45 had divided it, forever altering its boundaries. He got to know Houston this way, neighborhood by neighborhood, story by story.
“I love old things, old buildings, the weathered wood and so forth,” Hudnall said. “You feel kindred to it,” he explained, “I love to work with my hands, I love to build things.” The bricks, the homes, the community all held the same kind of handmade magic as a photograph, first put to film and then constructed tray by tray through the developing process to create lush gelatin silver prints.
He walked the streets with his camera, always remembering that an artist doesn’t take a photograph, but makes one.
Long after Model Cities had ended and the War on Poverty faded out of favor, Hudnall remained in these neighborhoods.
“I always gravitated back to the Fourth Ward,” Hudnall said, even when he was busy as a TSU staff photographer with the yearbook and numerous campus photography jobs. In Freedmen’s Town in particular, this increasingly meant documenting something that was being altered in irreversible ways.
“There’s always been that struggle with Fourth Ward,” Hudnall said.
By 1970, Fourth Ward already had the distinction of being, as one Model Cities coordinator, John C. Rowlett, put it, the
“most depressing slum in the city” that, as the Chronicle noted, “sits on its most potentially valuable land.”
What happened next is among the worst failures in Houston’s history.
Even with the expected $13 million in annual Model Cities funding, it wouldn’t be enough to overcome the $4-a-squarefoot prices in areas near downtown, according to Rowlett. At a panel discussion in 1970 at the University of Houston titled “Ghetto Housing, What Exists and What Should Be Changed,” Rowlett told the audience, “About all we can do is spread the money out and do the best we can.”
Meanwhile, organizations like the Houston Housing Authority and the Houston Housing Development Corp. had all but thrown in the towel. HHDC
executive director Tom Lord told the Chronicle that same year that “land prices are just too high,” to consider buying land for housing development. HHA director Tom Booker concurred: “It really doesn’t make much sense to place new housing in a residential area that doesn’t have much longer to go before it goes for commercial development.”
Of course, this was precisely the outcome many local leaders wanted.
It wasn’t just businessmen and politicians anticipating a new Fourth Ward.
By the 1980s, planners, artists and others were coming together to discuss the neighborhood’s cultural assets, including its architecture, history and artistic legacy.
Could there be another way to view the neighborhood?
No question. But could it be done without, in turn, fueling the very same growth machine that had already extracted so much from the community? Sociologist Sharon Zukin argued decades ago that the “discovery” of architectural and cultural merit in impoverished, historic neighborhoods was part of the process of gentrification, cultural value becomes economic value. Newcomers could point to the dilapidation of these assets and argue that they would be the proper cultural stewards of the neighborhood. Keep the “culture.” Lose the people. This happens in particular ways in Black urban neighborhoods, according to scholar Brandi Thompson Summers, who coined the phrase “Black aesthetic emplacement” to describe the phenomena of capitalizing on a neighborhood’s commodifiable Blackness while displacing its actual Black residents.
Against this backdrop, I view Hudnall’s flipping boy as buoyant and heavy at the same time.
“Hopefully I have documented it so that when people refer back, they can see individuals and not have to use their imagination,” he said.
His portraits of community seem to me to be gentle but steady rebukes to the visions of what Fourth Ward was — decrepit — or what it could be — valuable developments — showing instead what it was to so many — home.
“I always bump into someone who knows me,” Hudnall said. “There’s this brotherhood of how we communicate with each other through a nod. If you treat your subjects with respect, I feel I’m accepted.”
Hudnall is often oblique about what his body of work all adds up to here. “I think my legacy is up to how people perceive and what people think of me,” he told me. “I have no control over that.”
The power struggles and city politics are part of my perception when I view his images. Over the years, as I’ve spent time in many of the same neighborhoods Hudnall photographed, I’ve heard repeatedly from residents worried that their community would be the next Fourth Ward. I see Hudnall’s images of Freedmen’s Town largely through this frame but there are countless other ways to see them. They weren’t created as mere documentation, after all, but as art.
Though the city has changed over the decades, his medium hasn’t. There will always be something essential about black and white photography and the darkroom. “I control the process, I control the density of the negative, I can control the exposure I make in the darkroom, I can control the tone,” Hudnall said. “I become a part of it.”
His ongoing fascination with the process of producing a photograph is matched only by his desire to simply see what’s around him.
Hudnall’s hunger to see all the daily moments of life that his grandmother once recorded led him all over the city and well beyond. He remembers even following fire trucks at night, to see where they were headed.
Hudnall was part of a generation of artists, including Carrington who led Jake Yates High School’s photography program for years, who were deeply rooted in TSU and Third Ward, where he still lives today.
He only recently retired as the photographer at TSU. Now with more time on his hands and a daughter nearly out of high school, he finds himself drawn, as always, back to community. He says his next project is “going back into the neighborhood full time and documenting what is there, documenting the changes that have taken place and how and where we are going as a community.”
Perhaps this is his legacy and what makes his work so reflective of Houston itself: he never stops looking. What I saw the first time, or even the second or third time, when I viewed “Flipping Boy” may not be what I see the fourth time. I’m not entirely comfortable with that. My medium is storytelling. Beginnings. Endings. But that’s not how Hudnall works. He is forever tuning the dial in and out of the rhythm of daily life, catching those decisive but open-ended moments. Does the flipping boy land, two feet on the ground, or soar? The signal might be dropped. But it’ll come back. And he’ll be there, with his camera and a head nod.