As we at the Texas Observer were racing to finish proofreading of our November/December 70th anniversary issue, I managed to track down Alan Pogue in a back office of the KOOP radio studio off Airport Boulevard in Austin. I was a tad desperate to locate caption information for the images in this photo essay, and, to my relief, there he was copying over handwritten cutlines into an email to me.
The 78-year-old documentary photographer and longtime Observer contributor didn’t have too much time to talk, as he was scheduled to shoot an open house event the radio station was hosting. So his wife, Mary Birdsong, handed me a pair of old print articles about Pogue to help me flesh out this introduction. One, a 23-year-old piece in a now-defunct Austin monthly magazine called The Good Life, detailed his journey from Vietnam battlefield medic to visual artist capturing fights for social justice worldwide. From the late ’60s on, Pogue took his camera from counterculture gatherings in Austin to farmworker marches and colonias and prisons around Texas to Iraq and the West Bank.
“Pogue takes photographs that are open-eyed and unblinking views of what many would rather not see,” wrote the article’s author, Stuart Heady, who noted as well that the Observer used to run free ads for Pogue’s photo services in exchange for paying him “just five bucks a photograph.”
