OJAC Collection - Rick Williams

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Rick Williams

American, b. 1946
Rick Williams has been been a photographer for the past half century. He worked as a commercial photographer in Austin, Texas, for 30 years and taught photography at the University of Texas there for 10 years. He spent his free time lugging his Nikon cameras to nearby ranches, oil fields and tech factories, where he would document the lives of ordinary people at work. Williams embraces a black-and-white aesthetic in photography, with clear roots reaching back to Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Robert Frank. His photos combine strong composition, alluring tonality and a deep empathy with the people who are his subjects, whether they be rodeo cowboys, oilfield roughnecks or tech workers in a cleanroom. Most of his work was shot on film. He estimates he has 100,000 black and white negatives, compared to some 15,000 digital images — many of which were shot on his iPhone. Williams is the author of Working Hands, a book of his photography that was published in 2007. He is co-author with his wife, Julianne Newton, a professor at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, of Visual Communication: Integrating Media, Art and Science, a textbook published in 2009 on visual and media literacy that won the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in Media Ecology. Williams served as dean of the Division of the Arts at Lane Community College, in Eugene, OR for 15 years until he retired in 2016.

Source: eugeneweekly.com

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