County Fair Portraits

In the foreword to the original book, published in 1981, the late novelist James D. Houston compares County Fair to other well-known photography collections: “It brings to mind Edward Curtis’s Portraits of North American Indian Life, and the Dustbowl photos by Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and the series by Ansel Adams called Born Free and Equal, recording the lives of Japanese Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, east of the Sierra, in 1942, and Our Kind of People, Bill Owens’ study of hometown groups and rituals. County Fair has that same kind of narrative appeal. These eyes and outfits, the body talk, the tattoos and the jewelry – they tell us, with haunting precision, one of the true American stories.”