2024
Field Patterns and Test Recordings is a series of unscripted color photographs by Bill McCullough, spanning twelve years, 2008 to 2020.
March 24—April 28, 2024
Visiting hours Thursday–Sunday, 2-6pm
Artist Run Club, Wednesday, April 3, 6:30am.
Bill McCullough performs with Barry Stone & Mountains in Stars, Thursday, April 11, 4pm, part of Fusebox 2024.
Artist Talk and Happy Hour, Sunday, April 21, 4-6pm.
Closing Reception with performance by Knife in the Water, Sunday, April 28, 4-6pm.
Shot in bars, homes, subways, streets, and dances, these are not impersonal street photographs, McCullough has been allowed to each shoot by smile or nod. His camera is never hidden. Not photojournalism, McCullough keeps faith with the people he photographs. The candid details divulge nothing.
Before photography, McCullough was, and still is, a pedal steel player. The images have a music. McCullough uses illumination like recording studio microphones, finding or positioning light to balance layers of a composition like sounds in a room. Light is listening. The photos are complex with color harmonies, each realized in a shutter click akin to a clear note in the space between beats.
In the gallery McCullough arranges the prints as intimate geometries. Sequence and interplay between the photos suggest narrative patterns and under-stories, human truths beneath the surface of consciousness.
A review by Meher Qazilbash at Glasstire
Email to request a checklist of available prints.
Bill McCullough is a self taught, American photographer based in Austin, Texas. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, New York Times Lens Blog, New Yorker Magazine, New York Magazine,National Geographic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Rangefinder Magazine, Spot (Houston Center of Photography), Photonews in Germany, Lensculture, Photo District News, and other publications.
In 2008, his work was purchased for the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and in 2011 for the Portland Art Museum. His solo exhibitions include shows at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, OR, and SRO gallery at Texas Tech University. He has also participated in several group shows in the U.S., France, China, Russia, Malaysia, and Czech Republic.
He has won several awards including being chosen as a Fotofest Discovery in 2012, First place at the International Festival of Photography Photovisa IV in Krasnodar, Russia in 2012.
McCullough plays pedal steel as part of Knife in the Water, the beloved Austin dark-wave country combo.