If you took a picture of the photographer and teacher O. Rufus Lovett, you’d have to include the world around him. On a junior college campus in an East Texas town of about 12,000, he waits beside a warren of wet photo labs where students will work with paper and black-and-white film.

Yes, black and white. Yes, paper. Yes, film. In they drift, these students of the digital era, who enter the dark days of photography. In a darkroom they shine light through a negative onto coated paper. Then, they slip the paper into a bath of chemicals and watch that image slowly appear.

“I tell them they’re fortunate. They’re one of the last generations to learn black-and-white film photography,” says Rufus, photography instructor at Kilgore College in Kilgore. “At first they’re hesitant, but once they see the magic that can happen in a darkroom they fall in love with it.”

Exploring Shades of Gray
The young photographers soon admire this man as both teacher and artist. Like them, he shoots nearly every day, always exploring new ways of seeing shades of gray. Besides his skills as a photographer, Rufus personifies excellence in junior college instructors who both teach a profession and practice it. In his free time he shoots assignments down the road and around the world for magazines such as Gourmet, People, and Texas Monthly. The University of Texas Press published his first book of photographs, Weeping Mary, in 2006 and will produce his second, Kilgore Rangerettes, in September.

In the upcoming volume, Rufus portrays the famous precision drill team in practice, performance, and leisure moments from Kilgore to Dallas to New York. He captures Rangerettes in the context of their environment, such as their home performance field, R.E. St. John Memorial Stadium.