FORT WORTH IS A PHOTOGRAPHER'S PLAYGROUND

I was born in Fort Worth a few years before Urban Cowboy made electric bulls and honky-tonks part of pop culture, before Barbara Mandrell & the Mandrell Sisters got their own show, and before Johnny Lee’s Lookin’ For Love became the night’s last dance and closing anthem for many a courting couple.

I moved to Southeast Texas and spent my childhood in the soft sand of Crystal Beach and my teen years getting lost driving through the Houston Heights on Friday nights searching for live music venues that would let us in with our fake IDs. After spending most of the next 23 years in NYC and LA, I returned to the city of my birth, this time with my wife and children in tow.

I had made a full circle, lured home to Fort Worth by its small-city-big-town charm, the smooth winding of the Trinity River, and the palpable energy of its diverse culture and economy. Fort Worth is a city that holds on strongly to its past without entirely being defined by it. Yes, we’re proud of our rodeo, Billy Bob’s, the stockyards, the sweeping vanilla sky sunsets, and Joe T Garcia’s (the most beautiful patio this side of the border), but what I find fascinating is the new sprouting up among the old - and their ability to co-exist where other cities fail.*

Fort Worth’s downtown and its Old West history has weathered well to include a colorful and buzzing nightlife, complete with a hidden jazz bar in an alley. West Magnolia Street is home to independent coffee shop owners and restaurateurs, a testament to the lure of a walkable district and entrepreneurial spirit. And all around seem to be an explosion of new culinary artists vying for the attention of the locals’ discriminating palates.

There is, like most cities, a noticeable separation of cultures and economic boundaries. And while that has its own yin & yang, it allows for rich neighborhood regionalism and character to surface… and mix. It wouldn’t be uncommon to see a pickup truck with mud flaps blasting country music at a stoplight next to a car with a rattling back window pumping out hip hop moments before they both pull into the same lot to grab tacos at a taqueria truck.

To be a local photographer in Fort Worth is to have an unlimited pool of content to train one’s lens upon — the cars lines up at Coyote Drive-In, the changing landscape of Riverside, the changing leaves of Sycamore Park, the history of Ryan Place and Bluebonnet Hills. Throw a dart, pick up your camera, and go shoot.

* I lived in Manhattan’s East Village in my early 20’s. Soon after I left, the ‘new’ slowly replaced the ‘old’, and the artistic and cultural enclave that thrived for decades is now gone, as it is in many other parts of Manhattan.