Every photographer is limited by certain constraints—the subject of a story, an art director’s vision, a client’s directives—so the images he produces are not truly his own. You might say, then, that his most genuine work, the work that best reveals the clarity of his eye, is that which he produces just for himself. In this spirit we approached longtime Texas Monthly contributor Dan Winters—a California native and Hill Country transplant whose portraits of marquee-name celebrities also appear in such publications as the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Rolling Stone—and gave him an assignment unlike the dozens of others he’s completed for us since his haunting photo of a Huntsville prisoner graced our cover in August 1991: We asked him to sift through a career’s worth of unpublished shots (last year he processed 250 rolls of film he’d accumulated over some twenty years) and select a few of his favorites. The ten assembled here, most of which Winters had not even printed until now, were all taken with a handheld camera, available light, and for no other reason than to capture the beauty of a particular moment. “Even when I’m doing a color assignment and it’s a big dog-and-pony show with a lot of lighting and a lot of crew members, I’ll just take people aside and do a little bit for myself,” he says. The results are as intimate as they are revealing. Jordan Breal
