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Working Hands
Contributor(s): Williams, Rick (Author)
ISBN: 0890969558     ISBN-13: 9780890969557
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
OUR PRICE:   $40.50  
Product Type: Hardcover
Published: September 2000
Qty:
Temporarily out of stock - Will ship within 2 to 5 weeks
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Photography | Subjects & Themes - Regional (see Also Travel - Pictorials)
- Business & Economics | Labor
Dewey: 305.562
LCCN: 00037802
Series: Clayton Wheat Williams Texas Life Series
Physical Information: 0.68" H x 11.4" W x 9.33" (2.47 lbs) 132 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - Southwest U.S.
- Geographic Orientation - Texas
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Hands on the saddle tamed the land. Hands on the pump jack tapped the vast resources beneath the land to bring new wealth. Now latex-gloved hands work in sterile clean rooms, built on but isolated from the land, to make the microcomputer parts that take Texas and the rest of the world economy into the twenty-first century. Hands at work - the lifeways of people. In more than seventy stunning photographs Rick Williams portrays the daily lives of Texans at work in the industries that comprise the three economic pillars of the state.

Ranching, oil, and now microcomputer technology have formed the backbone of the Texas economy and shaped the culture for at least the last hundred and fifty years. As different as the three industries and the people who work in them may seem, many factors link them, as Williams's photography dramatically and often hauntingly illustrates.

The vibrantly reproduced duotones in the volume show people at work and at play - herding cattle, pulling pipe, and wearing "bunny suits" to process microchips. With effective documentary techniques, Williams provides portraiture and action shots that portray the kinds of people who work and the kind of world in which they labor. Grace and power, communication with animals and humans, evolving interactions with machines, geographic loneliness, and sterile isolation are themes running through his pictures, which effectively capture the play of light on the forms and character.

Williams offers a compelling visual exploration of the continuity and change, similarities and contracts of these three ways Texans have stood on common ground.