This book captures the debauchery of Texas’ upper class in photos

A bespectacled man sits before a triple beam scale, carefully but blithely measuring out a quantity of cocaine. Deer carcasses, their heads facing the camera, lie in a row, blood in the foreground. A woman’s blonde head rests in a man’s lap, surreptitiously performing oral sex at the edge of a white-clothed table. These are images of privilege, candid and spontaneous, depicting lifestyles of the rich, if not famous. They come from Will Vogt’s new photographic book, These Americans (Schilt Publishing, $50), featuring photos of his peers shot in Houston, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Hebbronville, and the East Coast. They tell a story of decadence unguarded, captured over many years, mostly in the ’70s and ’80s, by one who was there with a series of point-and-shoot cameras.

“I used to go to weddings, and I’d see the professional photographers, the chicks in the black outfits,” Vogt says. “I would think to myself, ‘I know who these people are. I know who the mother-in-law is. You probably don’t, and I’m going to outshoot you.’ I was like a gunfighter at these things. I was convinced that my inside knowledge would make me get a better picture. It might not be the really beautiful picture of the bride, but I could get the drunken bridesmaids later, the underbelly of what was really going on.”

Raised in Haverford, a wealthy suburb just west of Philadelphia, Vogt was given a Nikon for his 17th birthday in 1969. He was quickly hooked. A scrawny kid who wasn’t into sports, he used a love for literature and the arts to get him through boarding school. He moved to Houston in the late ’70s to get in on the oil boom, and then, after the bust, to the family ranch in the South Texas town of Hebbronville, where many of the These Americans photos were taken. Today he spends most of his time in Corpus Christi.

The title is a nod to The Americans, the 1958 photographic book by Robert Frank, one of Vogt’s heroes. Frank’s book was hugely influential in capturing the postwar lives of Americans from different social strata and races, and pointing out the inequality that a conformist Cold War country was doing its best to hide. Vogt is doing something different. He is showing what he knows, namely conspicuous wealth, and he’s doing it without mercy, favor or overt judgment. It’s hard not to laugh or recoil at some of the images in These Americans, but any objective assessment must also take into account their frankness, and the instinctive, unsparing eye of the man behind the lens. Unlike most other photographers of the upper class, like Slim Aarons, Vogt doesn’t seek to pose or glamorize. He’s after the real thing, and he is uniquely positioned to capture it.  

Vogt got the perfect person to write the book’s introduction: Jay McInerney, whose novels, especially Bright Lights, Big City, remain emblematic of ’80s excess. “He knows what they’re thinking, and he knows that it may not be pretty,” McInerney writes in his introduction. “He knows who’s [sleeping with] whom, who cheats at golf, who starts drinking at eleven in the morning. But he’ll take them as they are. They’re his people. And he shows them to us in a way that no one else has.”

Once Vogt’s editors Jennifer Garza-Cuen and Jordan Baumgarten agreed to work with him, they faced the task of sifting through and sequencing more than 100,000 photos. They wanted the end results, contained within the book’s blue-and-pink covers, to tell a story of a particular time, and particular places and people: the boy with pie all over his face (which looks a little like blood); the group of naked people with their faces covered (Vogt recalls that they were streakers who decided to pop into a party); the young man who seems to be practicing his golf swing by a urinal. The one known subject is George H.W. Bush, shown greeting supporters at a rally in Hebbronville during his first presidential campaign in 1988.

Garza-Cuen, who teaches photography at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, was fascinated by the sometimes violent ambiguity of the images. “There’s this push and pull of the beauty and the elegance and all the things that privilege brings, with some of the darker aspects,” she says. “The human nature is what human nature is. And of course, bloodsport is very much a part of that world. I think that we were very aware of all those themes, and our goal was simply to create a sequence that would sort of bring the viewers through, and let them make up their own minds about how they feel.”

The project made Garza-Cuen think of The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s novel about his lost generation tragically flouncing through Europe, for which the bluntly honest author was accused of class betrayal. “Well, nobody’s punched me out yet,” Vogt says. Many of those featured in These Americans are now deceased. Vogt also points out he took his photos in a much different time than today. There was no social media, or digital footprints to worry about. “People weren’t as worried about the ramifications,” he says. “There was no place to post. If you took a picture, what were you going to do with it? Put it in an album or something. It was not going to go right on your Instagram page the next day.”

Now, however, Vogt’s people have been preserved for posterity. In all of their glory. And all of their ignominy.