Phil Vinson • Author/Photographer*

Reviews and Articles

From Fort Worth Weekly, Dec. 3, 2008

A Picture’s Worth …

In author/photog Phil Vinson’s new coffee-table book, Cowtown isn’t all just skylines and cowboys.

By JEFF PRINCE

It’s impossible to come of age in a city as grand and colorful as Fort Worth without falling in love with the architecture and scenery: skyscrapers, mom-and-pop shops, rivers, viaducts, longhorns, stockyards, trains, movie theaters, and everything else that makes this city pop. Veteran photographer Phil Vinson has been documenting the city with an artist’s eye and a journalist’s insight for four decades, and some of his best photos are captured in his new 108-page coffee-table book, Fort Worth: A Personal View. Don’t expect much narrative. Other than a brief note by the author and a forward by local historian Quentin McGown, the rest of the book’s pages offer color and black-and-white photos accompanied only by concise titles and the year each photo was taken.

Vinson is old-school — his dust-jacket photo shows him with one of those large-format cameras that looks like an accordion mounted on a broomstick, the kind used by masters such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston to brilliantly capture clarity and light. Vinson, a retired commercial photographer and former Fort Worth Star-Telegram photojournalist, has been taking photographs since he was 12 and began developing and printing his own negatives at 13. That experience, combined with an obvious love for his subjects, results in a string of arresting photographs sprinkled heavily with a sense of nostalgia. Check out the Leddy boot sign and other familiar landmarks in the Stockyards, the now-demolished 7th Street Theatre marquee, the Swift meatpacking plant’s haunting ruins, and the baby’s grave marker at Pioneer’s Rest Cemetery.

Photographers and artists have been documenting Fort Worth for more than 150 years, but Vinson carves his own niche by eschewing panoramic views of landmarks in favor of more intimate takes. His fascination with close-ups, dramatic light, and compelling visual design gives new life to some old landmarks.

“Many of the weathered boards and faded signs have disappeared as the city has grown from the small town we’d still like it to be into the big city we sometimes struggle to recognize,” McGown writes. “But if I had to list those sights and scenes that daily remind me that my city is still here and alive, the list would include these images that Phil created.”

The book is well worth the $30 price tag, but it’s not without fault. It chaps my Cowtown-proud ass that a book about Fort Worth sports a cover photo taken at a barbershop in Glen Rose. Vinson, in fact, included a handful of photos taken at cities around North Texas and even West Texas, as if he liked those shots so much he couldn’t bear to exclude them even though they didn’t fit the theme. Fort Worth proper ought to provide more than enough source material for a captivating book.

From Fort Worth, Texas magazine, December 2008:

From Panache Magazine, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Oct. 24, 2008

Fort Worth Business Press, October 15, 2008

Lone Star Library:

Phil Vinson chronicles Fort Worth in pictures

BY MICHAEL H. PRICE

Fort Worth: A Personal View, by Phil Vinson (TCU Press; $29.95)

However many words a good picture is really worth, the sum must be incalculable in the instance of Phil Vinson’s new book of iconic hometown photographs. The veteran newsman-teacher-photographer-novelist has graced Texas Christian University Press with a genuinely striking title — compiled from a lifetime-to-date of, first, observing the city with youthful fascination and, then, committing his impressions to film as a working professional.

The published result, Fort Worth: A Personal View, is as rich in pop-cultural imagery as it is in acknowledged visual finery — contrasting, for example, the monumental limestone angels of Bass Performance Hall with the no less memorable (and long gone) shirtsleeves-diner façade of Famous Hamburgers. These random examples also serve to demonstrate the span of time covered, here, with modern-day vistas sharing the hundred-odd pages with photos from the last century.

Vinson’s view is straightforward and uncluttered, allowing each locale to state its case with wordless eloquence. The occasional digital-art manipulation (as seen in a chapel view at the Lena Pope Home) contrasts impressively with the found-object views. The photographs are arrayed with the blesséd randomness of dream-logic, darting from 1960 to 2006, for example, as gracefully as they dart between urban and rural settings.

Some pieces are as poignant as a no-name grave marker or a mid-1970s mom-and-pop grocery store, its sign beckoning “Tired, Hungry, Thirsty or Lost — Stop Here.” Others are rich in ironic humor, as in a dignified effigy of Buddha back-lighted by a neon glare, captured by the lens while at large in Rendon.

The roving cameraman ventures often beyond Fort Worth — Hereford, Arlington and so forth — as if to demonstrate the bearing of the city upon its state, and vice versa. Many formidable landmarks are covered, from the Peters Bros. hat shop and its surprisingly cartoony signage to the skyline itself. Vinson introduces the collection with an efficient manifesto of his motivations and influences, and Fort Worth historian Quentin McGown contributes a fine stage-setting essay for some of the most soulful photographs any city might yield.

Contact Price at mprice@bizpress.net

See Fort Worth up close and personal through Phil Vinson’s latest book

By Betty Brink, Fort Worth Weekly Online

Tonight, from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., local author, photographer and retired newsman, Phil Vinson will be signing his first book of photography, Fort Worth: A Personal View, at a reception at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, 1300 Gendy Street in the cultural district. As Fort Worth historian Quentin McGown writes in his introduction to Vinson’s book, “This is no glossy Chamber of Commerce collection …. Phil captures the essence of the city that lies in the details we know are there but rarely slow down long enough to ponder and appreciate.” Published by TCU Press, Vinson’s book of photos were taken over a period of four decades as he drove around the city documenting the daily life of its people, as well as its rich cultural history through intimate shots of its architecture, capturing many of the city’s oldest and most revered buildings before they became victims of the wrecking ball. Not only does Vinson provide us a visual history of what we were, he lets us see what we have lost. One can only hope that as this book is cherished for its superb photography, it will also be seen as a wake-up call for this now-booming city to protect the architectural gems still left that tie us all, natives and newcomers alike, to this city’s diverse and often quirky history. And, as a further tribute to his artistic skill as a photographer, 17 large, framed prints from the book will be on display at the Community Arts Center through the month of October. Go. Enjoy this unique work of one of Fort Worth’s finest photographers. Vinson’s book can also be purchased at Borders, Barnes & Noble, The Firehouse Art Studios and Gallery on Meadowbrook Drive, and Amazon.com.

Lone Star Library™:

Phil Vinson delivers a thought-provoking novel

BY MICHAEL H. PRICE, Fort Worth Business Press
June 25, 2008

It Takes a Worried Man, by Phil Vinson. VBW Publishing, $17

Scratch a veteran journalist, and nine times out of 10 you’ll find a natural-born storyteller. Fort Worth’s Phil Vinson has launched a storytelling-from-experience career with a rambunctious memoir called Ink in the Blood (see the Fort Worth Business Press, Sept. 12, 2005), and now he follows through with a thoughtful and provocative novel, It Takes a Worried Man.

The springboard lies as much in an awareness of anxiety as a psychological concern, as it does in a traditional country-blues verse that hangs upon these lines: “It takes a worried man to sing a worried song … I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long.” Anguish and hope, the sides of a coin, crystallized within the space of a few words: The Human Condition, in a nutshell.

Greg Spencer, the protagonist, is as worried as worried comes. Spencer’s journalistic ambitions run fast and deep, and he seems destined for an ideal marriage, as well. But Spencer also finds himself predisposed to panic in the wake of an accident. A promising new career seems to keep the anxieties at bay — until the job itself begins generating such pressures as to bring on a new siege of emotional terrors. Relationships suffer as that “worried song” begins playing like a continuous-loop tape cartridge in the back of the mind.

The mid-century — 20th, that is — setting provides an ideal backdrop, providing Vinson, as a playwright for printed-page actors who seem unnervingly real, with a period of social upheaval that made the newspaper business an especially unnerving line of work. Too, the urgencies of anxiety prove all the more pressing in an age before the medical profession had developed much of a grasp of emotional stress as a crippler.

A wide-ranging Texas milieu makes ideal use of Vinson’s knowledge of the geography and the culture. More than merely “writing what he knows,” however, the author delves searchingly into mental-illness territory with a need-to-know attitude that yields a great deal of enlightenment beyond the headlong narrative rush. Vinson’s brisk and telling dialogue reads almost as if overheard in real time. And his compassion for his characters mirrors the “won’t be worried long” hook that drives home the point of the tale-inspiring folksong itself.

Meanwhile, Vinson’s book of photographs, Fort Worth: A Personal View, awaits publication in September by Texas Christian University Press.

Contact Price at mprice@bizpress.net

Fort Worth Weekly, July 2, 2008

Dark Ages

Local author Phil Vinson limns the depths of depression in his debut novel.

By BETTY BRINK

Local writer and retired journalist Phil Vinson has published his first work of fiction — and it’s a good one, although I suspect it is not altogether fictional. I doubt that anyone can write as compassionately and insightfully as Vinson does about the private hell of what the psychiatrists now call “major depressive disorder” without having first suffered through it or seen it in someone very close.

It Takes a Worried Man was a painful but ultimately satisfying read for this reviewer who, like the protagonist Greg Spencer, spent too many years in that lonely black hole before climbing out into the sun again. The title, of course, is from the traditional folk song, “Worried Man Blues,” and the refrain “I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long” is the message for people who wake up each morning with the “shackles” of clinical depression’s worst manifestations: irrational fears, anxiety, paranoia, panic, feelings of worthlessness, thoughts of suicide, and frequent freefalls into catatonia. You can and will get well, Vinson tells us through Spencer’s story — if you don’t kill yourself first.

Fortunately for those suffering its pain today, the understanding and treatment of this disease are light-years away from the days when the 19-year-old Spencer first sinks into a “jangled melancholy” he can’t understand much less articulate to his frustrated parents. All he can tell them is that he doesn’t “feel right.” For months, he simply doesn’t want to get out of bed. “Why bother? …What’s the use? I’ll never feel normal again,” he says to himself each morning as he wakes up to a world where he feels he no longer belongs or even wants to be a part of. “All you need is a little backbone” is his mother’s advice. His father simply avoids him. Where has Spencer’s “zest for life” gone?

The time is 1959. The setting is Fort Worth, where Vinson’s autobiographical Ink in the Blood, published three years ago, chronicled a young boy’s coming of age in the working-class neighborhood of Polytechnic Heights in the 1950s. Ink ended with Vinson on the cusp of a career in journalism. His new fictional tome begins with a young man in his first year of college journalism — and on the cusp of flunking out. Spencer’s slide into darkness starts with a car wreck that leaves him with a concussion and broken ribs and a sadness he can’t shake. The journey that leads to recovery is a scary one indeed — not as bad as the 1948 novel The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward, about the horrors of an insane asylum — but it is equally disturbing in its depiction of the failed experimental treatments of the time and the careless over-prescription of drugs that were more dangerous than the disease they were designed to help.

We spend six, angst-driven years with Greg Spencer as he goes from one drug therapy to the next: first Miltown, a popular tranquilizer during the ’50s and ’60s that was later found to be a highly addictive barbiturate and is seldom prescribed today, through Valium, which he eats like candy, and, as many depressed folks do, self-medication through alcohol. No doctor ever tells him that the prescribed drugs are addictive, so of course he becomes addicted, exacerbating his depression. He also tries a “Freudian shrink” and finds the sessions probing his past (“When you built that snowman [at age five] how did you feel?”) silly and pointless. We become caught up in the highs and lows of his career as he finally gets his journalism degree, finds work at a succession of Texas newspapers, breaks a major story about corruption in high places in Galveston, and has a passionate love affair that ends badly, all the while trying to cope with the 9,000-pound elephant on his back.

Vinson brings to the written page a highly perceptive observer’s understanding of a disease that today afflicts more than 40 million American adults, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and one that is too often dismissed, even in this enlightened time, by family and friends with a “snap out of it” attitude. But as one doctor wrote, the clinically depressed patient can no more overcome his condition with will power than the diabetic can will his pancreas to produce insulin. Now, with wit and clarity and good writing and storytelling skills, Vinson has added to the growing body of knowledge of a disease that has burdened humans at least as long as we have had the ability to chronicle our history. But his is also a cautionary tale. The decades of the ’50s and ’60s, with their misuse of prescription addictive drugs to treat depression, were not that long ago. Vinson’s novel reminds us of just how close we still are to some very dark ages in our treatment of mental illness.

You can reach Betty Brink at

betty.brink@fwweekly.com