Author: Scott Newton

But the Fool on the Hill Sees the sun going down And the eyes in his head See the world spinnin round……..

I love the rainbow signifying all of the underlying turbulence. What an amazing experience; all of that water, drained from half a continent, concentrated and spilling over right in front of you….

Whoa. Cool. Is it really that color? Yeppers….

Near the Ides of March through the beginning of April, cactus bloom all across Texas. The prettiest of the colors is this brilliant orange-red of the Claret Cup. This was shot northwest of Austin, near Marble Falls.

This was shot just 10 seconds after the previous sunset (#20) with the telephone line. It’s in the opposite side of the sky. Sometimes beauty rolls in like waves.

What I really like about this shot isn’t just the brilliant, almost violent, color. I love the compositional element of the telephone line running at a sagging diagonal. It talks about connectedness and communication and tying together amid the stark natural locationless setting. .

Early one late Winter morning in the early 70’s the hippie colonies on 29th Street were roused by soldiers, carrying rifles, disembarking from buses into our street. It was hard to determine which group was more stunned, the soldiers in their late teens seeing hordes of half dressed hippies spill out of the houses, or the hippies who were sure Nixon had finally gone bonkers and sent in the troops. As it turned out, it was one of those events that will teach you to delay reacting when faced with a very odd situation. The radio announced that LBJ had died and that his body was being given an honor guard from the funeral home to his place of honor at the LBJ Library…We made sure that when his hearse passed he was accompanied by the proper dirge at as many decibles as our rock and roll amp and speakers could deliver: The Rolling Sones’ cover of Robert Johnson’s immortal tune “You Got to Move”. I’ve been told one could hear it from Lamar to Guadalupe…. May his Soul rest in Peace. He wasn’t so bad, after all; unlike the current usurper, he cared about people other than his rich cronies

Spare change for the poor pitiful oligarch…. One of the most creative and just plain fun image mongering tasks I get to work on is illustrating political direct mail. I work only for Democrats, (I find one has to pick a side), so here in Texas my business has been ummmm shrinking. Never the less, there have been many opportunities to skewer the opposition in the past, and some of them are harmless enough to share, like this one.

The name of the band is unimportant, although it was The Point. This shot was taken during the 3 day long celebration of our nation’s 200th anniversary in Gonzales, Texas. The Gonzales picnic was the wildest mass gathering of humans I’ve ever witnessed, contrary to the calmness illustrated here. This shot was taken near dusk on the first day. By the next sunset, the crowd was collectively shooting off barrages of Roman candles wildly at each other…. Anyway, I love this shot. It captures and illustrates the calming and evocative power of music over the multitude

I’ve been asked, many times, when it was that I became aware that I might be a photographer. I guess it was a gradual process that culminated in images like this self portrait in ’70-’71. This was a simple sandwich of slides…the resulting image said more than I knew words ever could. It was exactly how I felt in those wild and wonderful, revolutionary days.