A Book of Photographs From Lonesome Dove

A Book of Photographs From Lonesome Dove

by Bill Wittliff
University of Texas Press, 164 pp., $45

That UT Press has dropped Bill Wittliff's A Book of Photographs From Lonesome Dove into the middle of a much-ballyhooed Western movie revival is probably a coincidence: Lonesome Dove has always been its own cottage industry, immune for the most part to the withers and wherefores of cinematic trends. The rights to Larry McMurtry's book were optioned when it was still in galleys; they languished until the book won a Pulitzer Prize, at which time interest in its development as a screenplay increased considerably. Still, McMurtry had moved on, and lauded multitasker Bill Wittliff (Legends of the Fall, The Perfect Storm) signed on as screenwriter and an executive producer. The rest is a sort of demi-, fictionalized history. Lonesome Dove became a television miniseries, legendary for many things, including garnering a huge audience at a time (1989) when, as Stephen Harrigan puts it in his introduction, "Western movies were in one of their periodic eclipses."

None of the legend matters all that much when viewing Wittliff's photographs, however. In his foreword, McMurtry notes Wittliff's origins and talents as a book designer and that mastery is in abundant evidence here. Reproduced in sepia tones, the photographs are not movie stills in any traditional sense; their composition is more artful and idiosyncratic than documentary. Yes, there are actors being actors – roughly and unglamorously so, for the most part (Diane Lane excepted) – and recognizable scenes from the series. But there are also dark vistas and blurry-edged, ambiguous landscapes; epic-looking cattle drives and dusky chuck wagons; harrowing river crossings and somber, shaded portraits that are worlds removed from any kind of studio polish. They are quiet in a way that the movie, for all of its sorrows, is not. Nor would they pass as reproductions from the period; Wittliff's eye is simply too complex, his vision too layered, for his work to be mistaken for anything other than what it is: a singular gesture of visual mastery. His photography expands the bounds of its origins, making it something other and something more.