Equal Before the Lens: Jno. Trlica's Photographs of Granger, Texas

A first-generation Czech Texan, photographer Trlica made his portrait studio in Granger, Tex., an egalitarian meeting place for all races, from 1924 through the mid-1950s. His carefully posed yet artistic pictures celebrate turning points in the lives of blacks, Mexican Americans, Southern Anglos and the European immigrant community but scarcely hint at the intercultural tensions among these groups, as McCandless notes in her rewarding introductory essay. Trlica's orderly, static documentary photographs of cotton field workers, store windows, unpaved residential streets and festivals bear hardly a trace of Granger's racist climate, white Americans' fear and distrust of other ethnic groups or the severe economic dislocation resulting from overreliance on ``King Cotton.'' All of these issues are sensitively discussed by McCandless, a curator at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Tex. (June)