Ron Evans didn’t intend to become a photographer. When he graduated from Little Rock Catholic High School in the early 1960s, his chief ambition was to play rock ’n’ roll, something he did with local bands, including The Flames, for several years in his early adulthood. But when a broken left hand left him unable to play the guitar, he bought a cheap 35mm camera that he liked the looks of and started taking photos around Little Rock and, occasionally, the state.
Evans said he drew influence from the likes of documentary photographer Eugene Richards, whose first book, “Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta” was published in 1973. Thomas Harding III, the widely esteemed Little Rock pinhole photographer, was an early mentor. When Evans complained to Harding that the prints of Evans’ early work didn’t look like what he’d imagined, Harding told him he would need to print his own images to be happy with them. So Evans started printing his own work in his kitchen.
That skill took him to Dallas, where he worked at Kodachrome as a photo printer. He didn’t particularly like Dallas, but started working as a stringer for the Dallas Observer, a then-weekly newspaper that shared a sensibility with the Arkansas Times. He eventually landed a job there, where he photographed Dallas culture high and low, and ended up living and working in the area for more than 35 years, while always returning periodically to Arkansas.
Evans, 79 and now living in Virginia, devoted time early in the pandemic to reviewing the thousands of Arkansas photos he’d taken from the 1960s-1980s, and after whittling them down, compiled his favorites into a limited-run book, “Arkansas: Photographs by Ron Evans,” which he shared with the likes of President Bill Clinton, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Director Victoria Ramirez and the photographer Sally Mann. All but one of the following photographs come from that book. Evans, who is represented by the Afterimage Gallery in Dallas, is now prepping a similar project of his Texas photographs.
— Lindsey Millar