Peter Brown

Peter Brown

(b. 1948)

Houston photographer Peter Brown grew up on the East Coast and moved to California in the early 1960s. The trip across the country was inspirational to Brown and became a regular occurrence he looked forward to. As a fan of books and movies of the American West, he was drawn to the small towns, the wide-open spaces, the color of the sky and the people he encountered. He has spent years photographing the High Plains area and is known primarily for his images of timeworn single buildings photographed straight on. He has also captured picturesque landscapes with sky and clouds playing a key role in giving depth and form to the image. Brown has said of his photographs, “My work is not just about place… it’s also about feeling and interpretation.”

Brown’s undergrad degree is in English (BA Stanford University 1971), and he frequently writes prose to accompany his photographs. He returned to Stanford for an MFA in Art graduating in 1977. He taught at Stanford before moving to Houston in the early 80s to teach at Rice University. He was a founding member of the Houston Center for Photography and received many honors from the Center and Rice University. Brown is the recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. His writings and photographs have been published in Life, The New Yorker and Texas Monthly. His photographs may be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil Collection in Houston; the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth; The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans; the J. Paul Getty Museum in LA; and The Museum of Modern Art in NY.


Art on Campus

Burglars by Peter Brown

Burglars

Year: 1982
Medium: Photograph - Dye Transfer Print
Location: John Gray Center, Rudy Williams Building, University Advancement

Gift of Betty Moody in Memory of Clint Willour and Reid Mitchell

This photograph is from Peter Brown’s series Seasons of Light. There are 20 images in the series, most of which are interiors. The boxed portfolio of images was accompanied by letter pressed printed text. The portfolio won the Imogen Cunningham Award and was excerpted in several magazines. The series was later published in book form and released in 1988.

Brown said of the texts that accompany each photo: “I ‘read’ each image and wrote about the photographs in a variety of ways. The point I was trying to make was that photographs are multi-faceted things and can end up having wildly different meanings depending on the mind engaging with them, even a single mind at different times.”

Brown’s thought process is perfectly illustrated in this photograph. The casual imagery of a table containing simple, domestic elements of a peanut jar, a spoon, a book and glass half-filled with water take on a totally different connotation with the author’s text.

When the burglars hit, this is all they left me. The dust at the bottom of the peanut jar, a bad bent spoon and a Coke glass filled half-way with dead water. Broken windows - all just the way you'd picture it. Stuff strewn around. Should I barricade my back door? If I keep a baseball bat beside it, will I break my arms? My grandfather's watch. All my cameras. This is it, then, a glass of water, peanut dust, a spoon, a book and some sunlight.

The Burglars photograph is in the permanent collections of both the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. This particular print came from the art collection of renowned Texas art curator, Clint Willour. Willour donated over 1,000 works of art to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and helped to grow the museum’s photography collection into one of national importance. Willour’s remaining collection was inherited by Betty Moody, a celebrated Houston Gallerist. Moody gifted this photo to Lamar University along with many other museum-worthy pieces of art in 2023.