In our May issue, Taylor Walker-Williams wrote powerfully about being a first-time student at the University of Texas at Arlington during the 2020-21 academic year. The COVID-19 year. The year she lost herself, then through perseverance, found an even stronger version of herself.
She begins her writing with an observation. Because she never previously had a relationship with the UTA campus, she didn’t think being an online student in her first year would be a big deal. “It’s hard to miss something you never knew,” she writes. You can make the argument that, in spite of the many benefits of technology, the rest of Taylor’s story is about how deeply she did miss that physical connection to place.
About two decades before the global pandemic, UTA was a place that brought Chuck Pratt and me together. Our friendship developed like many workplace ones do — first we were colleagues, then we had an opportunity to work together to solve a big problem, and in doing so we discovered the harmonies within our similarities and differences. Man, did I love to talk with Chuck about photography.
Chuck did not play on the surface of his work, his photography, his interests, his relationships, or himself. He was the kind of person who dug deep. He’d study and study something until he realized it was impossible to know everything, but it was possible to understand what mattered. Then he kept digging, kept learning. This dedication manifested in many ways, including his startling observational and technical skills, respect for singularity, a love-hate relationship with minutia, and a vastly methodical and creative mind.
I think Chuck had the soul of an architect. This seems like an obvious thing to say given the subject matter of the collection featured here. What I mean is that Chuck, like an architect, believed in foundations, context and aesthetics. He studied art, architecture and design all his life. He understood how to coax 3-Dimensionality out of a 2-D medium. He obsessively dedicated himself to the tools of the trade, especially the printing process. Most of all, he conceptualized before he created. He didn’t just go out and shoot, not even in his early career as a sports photographer (most notably for Sports Illustrated) or later as a videographer. Every photograph he exhibited or kept or privately shared with me during our regular coffee chats — every one that mattered to him — exists because Chuck had an idea or an insight before he pressed the shutter button. Even images he shot spontaneously have the same kind of structural integrity and emotional complexity as those images he planned out months in advance.
After Chuck retired, he pursued many new creative interests, but his relationship with UTA didn’t end. Instead, he began considering the campus as a source of photographic inspiration. He spent hours scouting locations, metering the light, noting the change in shadows, and observing the ebb and flow of activity throughout the day. Sometimes Chuck brought his camera, sometimes he didn’t, but he was always in the process of photographing. He studied and studied until he began to understand what mattered.
Chuck shot hundreds (thousands?) of photos on the UTA campus. Then, jarringly, he was diagnosed with glioblastoma. Only one year later, in the midst of the global pandemic, he died peacefully at home in the care of his beloved wife Elizabeth Morrow, son Morgan Pratt, and his two sisters.
When I asked Elizabeth if Sociability could publish a few of Chuck’s UTA photos, she didn’t hesitate. We both want you to see what he worked so hard to understand.
As we prepare for the weighty unknowns of the 2021-22 academic year, my mind keeps drifting to Taylor. She will be stepping foot on the UTA campus — her alma mater and Chuck’s artistic muse — for the first time, even though she’s been taking classes there for a year. From second graders to second year grad students, think how many Taylors there are all over the world, “returning” to places they’ve never been. I just want to remind them that they’re going to be OK. Buildings and places can rise to many noble purposes, just like people. Having your feet on the ground in such a place can steady you and ready you for what lies ahead, because the kind of place you’re going is built for building community. Like UTA did by introducing Chuck and me.
Photographer: Chuck Pratt
Curator: Amy Schultz
Used with loving permission from:
Elizabeth Morrow
Grouping #1: The Prints
Over the years, Chuck was invited to exhibit several of his architectural images in juried gallery shows, including Fin Shadows and Pickard Hall, but of those he shot at UT Arlington, these three were among his personal favorites. We know this because he told Elizabeth so, and because he chose to print and frame them. To Chuck, the process of transforming a digital image to a printed one – crop, color management, paper selection, printer quality, scale, proofing, mat/glass/framing materials — was as significant as the image itself.
In each of the three groupings of the collection, click on each image to see its full form. When you do, can you see how each of Chuck’s decisions — such as crop, where the image begins and ends at its edges — significantly impacts the composition, story and mood?
Click the first image to open gallery.
Grouping #2: Curated Images
Elizabeth invited me to peruse a hard drive containing Chuck’s primary “UTA Buildings” folder, which contained more than 20 subfolders with names like “Engineering Research Building (ERB),” “Geoscience,” and “UTA Chairs,” which contained subfolders containing subfolders. His organizational method totally spoke to my own OCD tendencies, so from a research standpoint, it was a dream. In my role as curator, I drew on my own varied exhibition experience as a photographer. But from a personal standpoint, it was an emotional journey.
Even before he retired, Chuck and I would meet for coffee or lunch as a pretense for sharing “what we were working on.” It was a safe space to show each other works in progress, talk through mediocre ideas, and begin to polish diamonds in the rough. Over the years, I saw hundreds of images that Chuck shot at UTA, including a version of every one in Grouping #2. I selected these ten because they work together like points along an emotional continuum: figurative to literal, introspective to expansive, earth-bound to ethereal.
Click the first image to open gallery.
Grouping #3: Editor’s Finds
A photograph can be evocative for many reasons, but what elevates it to art? Is it because the artist says it is? As I searched through Chuck’s image subfolders upon subfolders, here are four of many I had never before seen, maybe because they were laying on the metaphorical cutting room floor and maybe not. By looking at the files, I can see that he spent at least some post-production time on each one. It brings me joy to imagine what Chuck was thinking as he considered their potential as art vs. talisman.
Click the first image to open gallery.
