Randy Brown is a Colorado-based educator and documentary photographer who has lived in Denver, CO, since 1991. He has Professor of Photography at the Rocky Mountain Center of Art + Design, where he has taught for 19 years. He was the recipient of a Hal Gould Vision in Photography Award from the Colorado Photographic Art Center in 2021. His work is in the collection of the Denver Art Museum and has been exhibited in more than 40 gallery exhibitions over the course of his professional career, which now spans more than fifty years.
Brown’s documentary work has encompassed human trafficking, PTSD and addiction among veterans, and the socio/cultural issues of climate change and drought, particularly the existential threat to farming and ranching culture, which in Colorado centers in the San Luis Valley and the overuse of water from the Colorado River. His most recent work is an extension of the San Luis Valley project titled “The Rio Grande: The River in Us; A Watershed Moment.”
www.randybrownphotographer.com. All photographs copyright Randy Brown.
Denver photographer / educator Randy Brown was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1951, then a town of about 95,000 he describes as “an interesting place to grow up.” He began studies in geology and petroleum engineering at Texas Tech in Lubbock Texas, before graduating with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1976. Not long after he moved to Dallas and was introduced to photography when a newspaper photographer - hearing he was leaving, cameraless, for a trip to Paris - gave him an old Vivitar camera and 20 rolls of film. In Paris, he chanced upon a gallery show featuring the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I think that's when things started changing,” he recalls.
When he returned to Dallas he enrolled in a Community College photography class and began photographing around construction sites and side alleys, creating abstracts of wires and utility poles. After a year in Dallas, he bought a 1963 VW bus and headed west with the idea of going to Carmel, home of Edward Weston and Group f64 photography. Sidetracked by Colorado and the Southwest he settled in Denver instead, and pursued street and documentary photography.
One of Brown’s engagements with street photography in Denver in the early 1980s involved the legendary Mudmen (see Mark Sink posts and photo below). “One day, the Mudmen just showed up on the 16th Street Mall and I happened to be there and have 35mm transparency in my camera. They just appeared, like these things appear out of the sky, and they stayed, I don't know, less than a minute, gathered up [their stuff] and ran off to someplace else. So, that was my experience with them, and that's the only time I'd ever seen them. They were just there and then they weren't. It was sort of like magic.”
Denver Mudmen on the 16th Street Mall, ca. 1982.
As in Lubbock, a group of photojournalists helped direct his career and build his community. He cites Ernie Leyba and Bill Wunsch of the the Denver Post, Linda McConnell of the Rocky Mountain News, and Anthony Suau, who won a Pulitzer Prize for work he made covering a famine in Ethiopia, as being particularly influential.
Leyba and McConnell both suggested he hang out at the Denver Press Club, where “writers and photographers flooded the bar and basement where the pool tables were.” Although Brown was working as a stringer for the Post and Rocky, he made his primary income working at B&W Photo, a photo lab near East High School. The lab had a contract with the Denver Public Library Western History Department (DPL), and he made contact sheets from glass negatives shot by Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson. This was actually quite a common job among photographers I’ve interviewed for this history blog. For instance, Thomas Carr, Gary Emrich, and Jay DiLorenzo all worked with 19th century glass plates at DPL or the Historical Society.
Often, photographers at the Press Club would talk about their next day’s assignments, but he found that unless he created something really unique, editors probably were unlikely to publish his work. Brown He was stringing for the Post and Rocky, and also for the Associated Press. He got his first big break when “maybe a half a mile in front of me, this dump truck sort of exploded into flames under a bridge. I drove past the accident to get a better vantage point, right past this burning truck, and I … just shot the hell out of it.”
“For those photos I went to the Associated Press, which was on Wazee Street. Ed Andrieski was the photo editor and a great photographer for the Denver AP Bureau. He loved the pic and sent it out on the wire. It was on the cover of the Rocky and the Post the next day and went out on the wires was published nationally. Then I got some calls from U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, Time Magazine, LA Times – anytime they had something in Colorado, they would call me.
During the late Reagan years, he photographed a protest at an MX missile site for Time. “There's hundreds of [missile sites], even now, in northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming. Time told me that people were going to hold hands and surround this site.” During the protest, he photographed a group of nuns who had been arrested many times being detained once more (above).
He also photographed at conventions in Denver for the National Organization for Women and the National Right to Life Committee, which was Phyllis Schlafly's organization. The conventions happened simultaneously and were extremely contentious. Brown witnessed many clashes and protests that attracted many people from Schlafly's group with ugly and demeaning signs. “I think I shot 25 rolls for Newsweek,” he recalled, [but they only] used a couple of the images because they were deemed too graphic for a wide audience.”
Colorado’s anti-gay Proposition 2, which passed in 1990 (later overturned by the Colorado Supreme Court) was part of a nation-wide movement to deny legal and human rights to the LGBTQ community. Brown remembers that, “just prior to that there were a lot of films and television shows being produced in Denver. After Proposition 2, that work all dried up. Colorado still hasn't recovered from that. Hollywood moved to New Mexico [which has] incentives for their thriving film production industry. So that cost a lot of people their jobs.”
Eventually, the economics of his situation made work as a stringer untenable, so Brown turned to architectural photography. Brown developed a technique that involved photographing from the top of buildings using a jerry-rigged painter's pole that extended out to about 12 feet; by attaching his camera with a cable release to its tip he was able to create vertiginous downward urban landscapes.
The work started to be noticed after the Rocky Mountain news art critic Mary Chandler included it in a show at the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria Campus. “It was probably my first exhibit. Then, after Carol Keller she saw the exhibition she started showing my work at her gallery in the Lower Highlands.”
Brown’s architectural work diverged after he moved to the new ballpark district. In 1994 he submitted a fly-on-the-wall series made at a restaurant called La Cupola as part of an application to Villa Montalvo near Saratoga, CA, southwest of San Jose. Once there he found he spent more time in traffic than photographing; inspired by the natural environment he was living in, he switched mediums and subject entirely to focus on self-portraits made by applying organic materials to paintings.
He continued to paint and photograph for ten years. Works made at the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire in 1999 (above) were shown at several galleries - DeLeon White, Carol Keller, Sandy Carson - and two pieces were purchased by Jane Fudge, a well-respected curator of photography at the Denver Art Museum.
Above, clockwise: Andre Herrera, podcaster, musician, music producer in a small town of Capulin, Colorado; Noelle (?), rancher; Daniel, former ranching intern; Jason Medina. Photographs from “In the Middle of Everywhere: Scant Water” by Randy Brown.
Brown’s most recent activities concern water rights and water diversions of water resources from Colorado’s San Luis Valley to communities along the Front Range. The project’s title is “In the Middle of Everywhere: Scant Water.”
He began Faces of the Valley in 2020, during Covid, which exposed the politic divide between urban and rural centers. “It was interesting to go down there, having been in the city wearing a mask everywhere, and nobody down there is wearing a mask. Immediately, [I knew that] if I walk into a barn-raising wearing a mask, nobody's going to talk to me.” Yet he found that MAGA and non-MAGA alike, the people he met were generally in agreement about water rights and the need for water conservation: As Brown told me, “That this is an issue that's bringing people together no matter what their economic class is, or their cultural background or politics are.”
Nine of his stories have been published online by the Alamosa Citizen under the banner “Faces of the Valley.” Brown’s photo essays are accompanied by interviews he made with his subjects. One typical example is his profile of Jason Medina, Executive Director of the Community Foundation of the San Luis Valley [here].
Brown’s instinct for authenticity and connectedness, he thinks, came from his grandfather, who was a reporter at the newspaper in Wichita Falls. “When I was a freshman in high school I'd ride around with him. He'd go into a small town and would go to a barbershop and find out what was going on and then they'd say, "Oh, yeah, you got to talk to Hal down there. He's working on this old car, and this'd be a good story." And then Hal would say, "Oh, yeah, this other guy," and that kind of stuff. And I didn't realize probably until the last four or five years, maybe in the last three years, how much I got from him in regard to being curious. People trust me, knowing how to be authentic.
Rio de la Vista. “She lives on the Rio Grande. Interesting, Rio De La Vista having a great view of the Rio Grande.”
His fixer in the valley was Rio de la Vista (above), a community activist affiliated with the Environmental Law Center and the Salazar Center at Adams State University, Alamosa. Through her connections, Brown experienced the same chain of introductions he had experienced with his grandfather. Brown’s plan for the project was initially to trace the Rio Grande down into New Mexico and to El Paso - something that photographer Laura Gilpin also did immediately after WWII. Her documentation resulted in a book titled The Rio Grande: River of Destiny (pub. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), which in turn inspired a San Luis photographer named Ruth Marie Colville to document the Spanish trails in the San Luis Valley in the 1960s.
Images above, Clockwise: Syana Coleville; Dean Coombs, publisher of the Saguache Crescent; George Whitten, San Juan Ranch; David Coleville and his daughter, Syana on the Corset Ranch.
The name Colville reappears in an interview published in the Alamosa Citizen that features Brown talking with David Colville and his daughter Syana on their Corset Ranch (images below). Asked about the effect of dwindling water, David describes a “chain reaction... Anaconda Ditch is now gone … the Meadow Glen doesn’t run at all. It might as well be shut down at this point. And now the Independent is the third one in line. It’s that chain effect, it’s not good.”
Where collectivity and activism present a solution, so too does grasping the reality of legal rights. Julie Sullivan, so-owner of the Whitten Ranch describes is thus: “[What] has come home to roost now, is the fact people assumed that their right to the water meant they owned the water, they had the right to use the water, but they didn’t actually own the water. I think here in the Valley people are trying to really understand the distinction between how they perceive their right to use the water with what they legally have.”Today, Brown has moved his focus north.
An extended portfolio of images from the “Scant Water” project can be found at randybrownphotographer.com. The page includes links to all the profiles and editorial content published by the Alamosa Citizen.
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