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6/2000 Terry Vine – Portfolio
La Vida Tradicional

Article Translation (from German) Contents Page — Terry Vine

In the little town of San Miguel de Allende, this American photographs the poetic aspects of the culture of his neighboring country with a sharply selective imagination.

Title Page — La Vida Tradicional
The American Terry Vine portrays a small Mexican town whose populace has maintained a strong cultural identity despite increasing tourism. Impressions from San Miguel de Allende and its inhabitants, photographed with an eye for the significant detail of poetic moments.

Caption (p.11)
Portraits of timeless beauty. Terry Vine focuses on a small gesture, a pose, and striking details in the obvious image: a pigtail, clasped hands, a glance directed toward him.

Article — Religion, Rite and Lived Tradition

Terry Vine brought back only a few pictures from his first stay in San Miguel de Allende, a dreamy town of 20,000 souls in central Mexico. “At that time I tried to photograph as I previously had in Paris: I concentrated on city scenes, atmospheric pictures. Then it became clear to me: what this place displays so singularly is the people and their culture,” says the Texas photographer. “They are much more open, warm-hearted and friendly than I had expected, completely different from Paris.” In his picture series La Vida Tradicional,Vine dedicates himself to these people and their surviving traditions. The shy forty-year-old, whose pictures today already hang in some U.S. museums, notes that San Miguel is today no longer a secret—the picturesquely situated location in the mountains draws a large number of domestic and foreign visitors, especially to its festivals.

“I knew that I had to find another starting point for my pictures, if I didn’t want to slickly repeat already-existing motifs.” Terry Vine’s eye is attracted to significant detail; he seeks out old rituals (often religious), festivals; he seizes upon the meaningful and focuses with his Fuji GX 680 on the insignias of the inherited culture. “I am on the lookout for illustrative, romantic images [and] wait for the central element that summarizes a scene.”

Vine acknowledges his astonished perspective as an outsider, to have discovered a culture that was scarcely known to him. “I do not claim to understand everything I meet with,” he says. Vine had begun work with his Fuji medium-format bellows camera only shortly before his first stay in Mexico. Previously he had photographed exclusively with a 35mm SLR camera. “I liked the 6cmx8cm format right away,” recalls the Houstonian. “The bellows allows me to control very precisely the focal plane in the exposure.” Often he has worked almost like a photojournalist with the rather bulky apparatus, without a tripod.

Terry Vine is stimulated by the Mexican festivals; he has photographed during Holy Week and on the Day of the Dead; he has visited the provincial circus and the cockfights; he has portrayed a matador and a Mariachi player; he has photographed in cemeteries and at processions. “I felt myself attracted to these not infrequently hectic and chaotic surroundings, but in taking pictures I concentrated on the details.” Often he consciously renounces the individualization of the figures. He begins to cut off heads by cropping; he turns rather toward clothing [and] décor, by means of blurred impressions. “I believe that you can read a picture more penetratingly when it is not fixated so strongly on people (and personality),” says Vine.

When he photographed the farm-hand Adela in a town outside San Miguel, he was actually on his way to a cooking class. He had already planned a picture of a woman with a pigtail when he discovered Adela. The gentle woman wore a blossom-white dress and posed patiently. As she turned around, she had her hands clasped together. That gave rise to a second motif that later decorated the invitation to an exhibition in Texas.

Vine, who grew up in a small town in Ohio, reports: “I have taken photographs for most of my life. When I was twelve, I began to take photographs for my hometown newspaper. I took typical pictures like portraits of the mayor greeting people honored by the town.” SoonTerry’s father had to build his own darkroom for the boy. “At that time neither the newspaper nor I really knew what we were doing,” says Terry, reminiscing. “In any case, I kept on taking pictures, and slowly it became clear that I would later make it my profession. At some point I realized I had to move to a big city if I wanted to pursue photography commercially. I decided on Houston because I had friends here.”
After four years as an assistant, Terry, at twenty-five years of age, opened his own studio. Pictures like La Vida Tradicional originate today side-by-side with his professional work and definitely have an influence on his commercial photography. “Meanwhile, I increasingly receive jobs from clients who have seen my work exhibited in galleries. My commercial pictures are becoming more and more like my personal, fine art images.”