Photographer Basil Clemons: Witness to a West Texas Boomtown

In conjunction with Fotofest 2022, the Heritage Society is pleased to present an exhibition of 61 photographs by Basil Clemons (1887- 1964), taken in Breckenridge, Texas from the 1920s to the 1940s. When Clemons arrived in Breckenridge after working in the Yukon and joining a traveling circus, the town's oil boom was in full swing. Soon, the Breckenridge field was producing 50 million gallons a year—more than the entire state of Louisiana — and a gusher of wealth boosted the town's original population of 1,500 nearly twenty-fold by the mid-1920s. Clemons' images, as arresting and eccentric as the photographer himself, are a bohemian chronicle of a lively, free-wheeling era. A true original in every sense of the word, Clemons was largely self-taught and lived for decades in a converted chuckwagon without electricity or running water. His photographic legacy, quirky, informal and affectionate, offers an intimate view of the social history of small-town Texas and the cycle of boom and bust that characterizes the oil industry to this day.

EXHIBIT INFORMATION:

September 20, 2022 to February 2023

Albert & Ethel Herzstein Museum Gallery

1100 Bagby Street, Houston, TX 77002

Wednesday - Saturday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Free parking, Tickets only $5. Purchase online HERE or in person.

For Group Tours, please call 713-655-1912 or email us at info@heritagesociety.org.