Photography Exhibit by Basil Clemons: Witness to a West Texas Boomtown

Photographer Basil Clemons: Witness to a West Texas Boomtown
In conjunction with Fotofest 2022, The Heritage Society is pleased to present an exhibition of 61 photographs by Basil Clemons (1887- 1964), taken in Breckenridge, Texas from the 1920s to the 1940s. When Clemons arrived in Breckenridge after working in the Yukon and joining a traveling circus, the town’s oil boom was in full swing. Soon, the Breckenridge field was producing 50 million gallons a year—more than the entire state of Louisiana — and a gusher of wealth boosted the town’s original population of 1,500 nearly twenty-fold by the mid-1920s. Clemons’ images, as arresting and eccentric as the photographer himself, are a bohemian chronicle of a lively, free-wheeling era. A true original in every sense of the word, Clemons was largely self-taught and lived for decades in a converted chuckwagon without electricity or running water. His photographic legacy, quirky, informal and affectionate, offers an intimate view of the social history of small-town Texas and the cycle of boom and bust that characterizes the oil industry to this day.
From an exhibition review in GlassTire, “photos of Breckenridge’s social gatherings, shop windows, and bustling, derrick-strewn townscape often appear just as strange, in an oddly comforting and familiar manner, as the traveling shows that blew into town, worked their magic and mojo, and then vanished down the rails and roads.”
Biographical Note by University of Texas Arlington
“Basil Edwin Clemons was born July 22, 1887, in Lauderdale County, Alabama, to Lemuel Joseph and Sarah Alice Clemmons. In researching their ancestry, Clemmons family members found that official documents list the name with two m’s although Basil spelled it with only one. The family moved to Ridgeway, Texas, while Clemons was a child. In 1903, at age sixteen he left Texas and the family’s cotton fields behind for California. He witnessed the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, learned photography in Hollywood, and trooped with the Tom Mix Wild West Show. Around 1909, Clemons drifted to Alaska where he photographed gold mining camps, Indians, Eskimos, and dogsled races. While in Alaska he joined the U.S. Army and trained at Fort Liscom, Alaska. After his army discharge in 1918, he moved to Seattle, Washington, where he established a photography studio. While traveling with a circus in 1919, he returned to Texas. After receiving word that his studio in Seattle was destroyed by fire, he headed toward the oil boom town of Breckenridge in Stephens County, Texas. There, he photographed the oil fields, the town, and its surrounding communities until blindness and other health problems ended his career in 1949.
Clemons lived and developed his photographs in a gypsy wagon without the benefit of running water or electricity. Unfortunately, there are no photos in the collection of this wagon other than small portions of the interior or exterior in an occasional print. His photographs epitomize small-town America, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. Clemons utilized some techniques largely unknown to the photographic profession. In 1936, he turned down an offer from Eastman Kodak Company for his process for color development. The collection contains only a few examples of his color prints which are now badly faded. He spent a lifetime capturing the vitality of Breckenridge and neighboring communities in Stephens County with his portraits of people and their lifestyles.
Basil Clemons died June 22, 1964, in Breckenridge and is buried beside his parents in Hopkins County, Texas.”
EXHIBIT INFORMATION:
September 24, 2022 to February 2023
Albert & Ethel Herzstein Museum Gallery
1100 Bagby Street, Houston, TX 77002
Wednesday – Saturday, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Free parking, Tickets only $5. Purchase online HERE or in person.
For Group Tours, please call 713-655-1912 or email us at info@heritagesociety.org.