Western Art News
Photography by Lonesome Dove screenwriter Bill Wittliff on view at the Booth Western Art Museum.
The late screenwriter, author, movie producer and photographer Bill Wittliff will be honored with the exhibition Lonesome Dove: Photographs by Bill Wittliff at the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia. The show opens September 19 and continues through February 9, 2020.
Wittliff, who rose to fame writing episodes of Lonesome Dove, was a photographer for much of his life, including on different movie and television sets he was on. “Bill was shooting with an ordinary single-lens reflex camera on black-and-white Tri-x film,” says friend and author Stephen Harrigan. “There was already an official unit photographer to take publicity stills on the Lonesome Dove set, and I just assumed that Bill, as the writer/producer of the movie, was making a private photographic record. In fact, he was making art.”
The exhibition features 55 sepia-toned photographs originally taken during the filming of the famous American miniseries. “His photographs explore the subtle line between actor and character, between film set and the Western landscape,” the museum says, adding, “As author of the novel based on Lonesome Dove, Larry Mcmurtry says, ‘Some pictures are about actors or about the characters as they play. Some are about South Texas or about the Rio Grande. Some are about cowboys, male bonding or the men inside the actors and the actors inside the men.’”
Wittliff died in June, but his legacy lives on in his writing and photography. For more information, visit www.boothmuseum.org.