Texas

Now, many of them, and dozens more of her stellar images - from every corner the state - are now available in Texas, a limited edition, highest-quality, 256-page, hardcover coffee-table book, with a foreword by Librarian of Congress James Billington. This new book also includes expansive introductory text written by renowned Texas historian and raconteur Lonn Taylor of Fort Davis, host of The Rambling Boy: Stories About Texas weekly radio series. As Taylor's introduction notes, "it is almost impossible to generalize about Texas. The red clay and Piney Woods of East Texas might well be in Alabama; the high desert of the Big Bend is indistinguishable from Chihuahua. The Spanish moss and oak trees of the Coastal Bend, to which my grandmother Taylor's family immigrated in the 1820s, could be in the Mississippi Delta they left behind. My cousins there have little in common with the Spanish-speaking vaqueros of the Brush Country farther south, or with the hardscrabble German farmers of the Hill Country, or the drought-ridden ranchers of West Texas, who included my mother's people. Geographers distinguish eighteen physical regions of Texas." Carol M. Highsmith's historic visual documentation of Texas presents emphatically memorable images of these distinctive regions, as well as many other aspects of the dynamic, multicultural state. Her images in this important new keepsake volume represent the very best images from her extraordinary exploration of Texas for the Library of Congress, the first of its kind since Dorothea Lange and other documentary photographers took to the dusty roads of America during the Great Depression more than 75 years ago. Dallas "philanthropreneur" Lyda Hill, who designated this spectacular new book, Texas, as "a masterpiece and a treasure", underwrote Highsmith's explorations of colossal Texas.