No road trip in Texas is short, but few last 50 years.
Some, however, do.
Randy Mallory spent five decades criss-crossing Texas, taking photographs for magazines like Texas Co-Op Power, the magazine of Texas’ rural electrical cooperatives. Now, UNT press has published his life’s work in a book, “The Fifty-Year Texas Road Trip: On Assignment from Earth to Uncertain.”
Deep in the heart of Texas, Mallory watched the stars at night. He captured the eyes of Texas, and at least once, he saw Amarillo by morning.
From a man racing crawfish in Port Arthur to camels reenacting army patrols in Big Bend, from a stretch limo outside the Lubbock Public Library to a steam-powered riverboat on Caddo Lake, Mallory saw every side of Texas: strange, spell-bounding, sinister, and sweet.
But when he began his career half a century ago, Mallory was not looking for any of this. He was looking for brooms.
Mallory’s journey began in 1972 with a suggestion from the teacher of a photography workshop.
“He said that wherever you go as a photographer, have something you’re intentionally looking for. And for some reason, I don’t know why, I picked brooms,” Mallory explained. “Ever since, in the back of my head, I’ve been looking for brooms wherever I travel, all across the state.”
Courtesy of Randy Mallory
Mallory’s book includes only two photographs of brooms, but he credits this exercise in observation with some of the most striking images of his career.
“The beauty of this idea of having something intentional in the back of your mind all the time is it makes you really focus on where you are, and you can discover things that you weren’t particularly looking for,” Mallory said.
In his 50-year career, Mallory stumbled onto a lot of strange Texas monuments, from “a bright orange Volkswagen Beetle hanging from a giant live oak tree” in rural Central Texas to “a female mannequin wildly dressed as a pregnant rock star” in the Rio Grande Valley.
And now, even in retirement, Mallory still keeps his eyes peeled.
“I still look for brooms,” he said. “I don’t take as many photos, certainly, as I used to during my career, but I love discovering the serendipity of travel.”
Mallory hopes his readers will take away a simple message from his life’s work:
“Explore the state first-person, and make [your] own road trip, even if it doesn’t last fifty years…”
