In Place

Texas 1970’s

Arkansas 1980’s

Houston 1980’s

Pozos, Mexico 1990’s

Texas / Mexico Gulf Coast 2000’s

Galveston 2010’s

The photographs of Geoff Winningham

The Brandon Gallery Houston

Opening December 12, 2025

7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Exhibition runs through January 9, 2026

HOUSTON- Please join us for an unprecedented look at the far-reaching career of photographer Geoff Winningham. During a career that spans over four decades Winningham photographs the life and landscape of the Southern United States and Gulf of Mexico, offering us insight into this complicated sociopolitical and geographical landscape. Part photo documentarian and part keeper of the South’s secrets, Winningham’s work cleaves open a space from within which to ruminate on the precarious relationship southerners have with the natural forces that surround us; be they the oil that built a cities fortunes or the hurricanes that tear them down.

In this exhibition we are given a glimpse of the Houston of the 70’s where glistening wrestlers light up the coliseum and demolition derbies carve up the Astrodome. Winningham shows us the excesses of an oil boomtown of the 80’s and the melancholic, chaotic post-Ike Galveston. He will also be showing a selection of photographs from his most recent book, Of the Soil: Photographs of Vernacular Architecture and Stories of Changing Times in Arkansas, which was published in October of this year by the University of Arkansas Press. These images of vernacular architecture, that took over two decades to amass, exquisitely render a place and time long forgotten.

GEOFF WINNINGHAM earned his bachelor’s degree in English literature from Rice University before pursuing photography. He received his masters degree in photography in 1968 from the Institute of Design, where he studied with Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siegel.

Over the span of his career, he has received two fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous commissions. He has published twelve books and completed three documentary films on a wide variety of subjects related to Texas and Mexican culture. His book Traveling the Shore of the Spanish Sea: The Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico (2010), won both the Ron Tyler Prize from the Texas State Historical Association and the J. B. Jackson Award from the Foundation for landscape Studies. His photographs are in many major collections in the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Wittliff Collections.

His work has been published in numerous anthologies, including 20th Century Photographs from the Museum of Modern Art; Courthouse; Faces: A History of the Portrait in Photography; and Masters of the Camera.

He holds the Lynette S. Autrey Chair in the Humanities at Rice University, where he has taught photography in the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts since 1969.