Friday Night Lives

This impressive illustrated volume revisits Clark’s photography that accompanied Buzz Bissinger’s bestselling Friday Night Lights (1990), about Texas high school football. Twenty photos appeared in that volume, and here Clark selects additional standouts from the 137 rolls he shot, beautifully capturing late-1980s Odessa, Tex. These photographs of the town—home of the Permian High School Panthers football team—display the grittiness of rural Texas, the physical exertion of the football players as the sun beats down upon them, and the agony of defeat and the triumph of victory. Of particular note are a handful of contemporary images showing grizzled ex-players alongside the more ebullient youth (tight end Brian Chavez, who went on to attend Harvard, is shown as a teenager outside the high school in his letterman jacket before a game, and, in 2019 posing with his two sons wearing camo and holding a rifle). In Clark’s afterword, he describes how he first proposed to work with Bissinger, and his interest in photographing Odessa, which “was and still is, I imagine, a fistfighting town.” This is a fitting coda for fans of the book and show, and anyone with an interest in the rural America of a bygone era will want to take a look. (Nov.)