For more than five years award-winning photographer Geoff 
Winningham explored and photographed Buffalo Bayou, the 
Houston Ship Channel, and the landscape he found along the way. 
As he hiked and canoed the course of this historic stream, he found 
pristine stretches of the bayou still untouched by the encroaching 
city of Houston. He also found areas where the forces of nature 
and those of the growing city seemed to struggle for supremacy. 
He revisited sites of historic importance, such as Allen’s Landing, 
where the city was founded in 1836, and the San Jacinto 
Battlefield, where Texas won its independence in the same year.

    In Along Forgotten River Winningham has sequenced eighty of 
his striking, large-format black-and-white photographs, following 
Buffalo Bayou from its source in the Katy Prairie through the 
suburbs and into the inner city of Houston. From there, his 
stunning duotone photographs follow the bayou east to its 
confluence with the San Jacinto River, where it becomes the 
Houston Ship Channel, crosses Galveston Bay, and enters the Gulf 
of Mexico.

    As a counterpoint to his photographs, Winningham has edited 
and sequenced passages from the written accounts of the earliest 
travelers to this part of Texas. Impelled by dreams or curiosity, an 
incredibly diverse lot of travelers came along the roads and streams 
of Texas in the preceding centuries. There were Spanish friars and 
itinerant preachers, prospective settlers, refugees, adventurers, 
exiles, and naturalists.

    Some travelers came with their families, looking for a place to 
settle. Mrs. Dilue Harris was one of these who came to Texas in 
the early 1830s. In her "Reminiscences," she recalled a night on 
Buffalo Bayou: "We were surrounded by wolves and water. There 
was a large sycamore tree that stood in the water near us, and it 
was as white as snow. The buzzards roosted in it. We could hear 
owls hoot all night. Mother said it was a night of horrors.  .  .  . She 
said the owls were singing a funeral dirge, and the wolves and 
buzzards were waiting to bury us. . . ."

    In Along Forgotten River Winningham has selected passages 
from the writings of these and other early travelers and interwoven 
them with his remarkable and beautiful photographs. The result is 
a complex and fascinating interplay of pictures and words, of 
historical perspective and present-day observation. 

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GEOFF WINNINGHAM is best known for his six books and three 
documentary films relating to Texas and Mexican culture, 
including Friday Night in the Coliseum, a study of professional 
wrestling, and Rites of Fall, his now classic book on high school 
football in Texas. He also published A Place of Dreams, a look at 
the city of Houston at the time of its 150th anniversary and In the 
Eye of the Sun, a photographic study of popular Mexican fiestas. 
Winningham is a professor of art at Rice University, where he has 
taught photography in the Department of Art and Art History since 
1969.