About this series: Memphis has played muse over the years to artists across the spectrum, from the music of Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Al Green, and the collective at Stax Records, to the prose of Peter Taylor, Shelby Foote, and John Grisham. Visual artists, too, have been inspired by Memphis, whose look has been described as gritty, dirty, active, eerie, beautiful, and captivating. “The Mind’s Eye” profiles the photographers whose work documents the city. Past stories in the series — featuring Bob Williams, Murray Riss, Saj Crone, Karen Pulfer Focht, Willy Bearden, Jamie Harmon, Brandon Dill, Ziggy Mack, Ernest Withers, and Andrea Morales — are showcased in our digital archives (memphismagazine.com).
photograph by houston cofield
This image of the sun appeared in “Measuring Time,” a feature story in The New York Times.
Houston Cofield was immersed in photography from the start, born 32 years ago into a family that took the art form seriously. “On my mom’s side, my grandfather was always shooting pictures, mostly family photos that he would develop and show to us and then send them to his friends,” he says. “My dad’s side of the family had photographers dating back to 1850. My dad’s dad and my great-grandfather were both studio photographers who worked for the University of Mississippi as portrait photographers, and then professors. They photographed William Faulkner throughout his life and published some books. I saw those books and their pictures all over our house growing up.”
photograph by reid mitchell
Houston Cofield
Cofield knew photography was a viable career option but didn’t get into making pictures seriously until high school. “I was working for the school newspaper mostly so I could have a free study hall at the beginning of the day,” he says. “But I would go out and shoot pictures for an hour each morning and I don’t think our teacher really cared what we did. I wasn’t so much drawn to any sort of student events or sports; I was just making pictures of the grass and flowers and chain-link fences — things I thought were interesting. I really loved seeing these little scenes in a rectangle.”
He attended Ole Miss, taking English and journalism courses and putting photography on the back burner. “I felt I needed to have a career in writing and that maybe photography could complement that,” he says. “But towards my junior or senior year of college, I was so drawn to making pictures that I started taking art courses and fell in love with the process of shooting on film and creating pictures in the dark room. I was thinking more about photography as an art form instead of purely documentary.”
“Expectations have to be set aside because you don’t know the environment you’re going into, and there’s no sense in trying to preconceive a picture. You’re always going into a location that you have no clue what you’re stepping into.” — Houston Cofield
Cofield went on to grad school at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he says he “loosened up more and more.” He was drawn to looking into his family’s history and what they photographed in the course of making his own history. He and his wife, Kristen Hoover, came back to settle in Memphis, where he took a marketing job with the Metal Museum and she went to work at Youth Villages as a mental health therapist.
The cover of our March 2022 issue features a cover photograph by Houston Cofield, showing the moon setting over fields near Hughes, Arkansas.
The Metal Museum job let him use his skills and gave him the opportunity to be around other artists. He moved on to a position with the Daily News before it morphed into the Daily Memphian. He’d do business portraits and photos relating to finance and real estate, which challenged his creativity.
“I loved the fact that people could make something out of nothing and make it look really interesting,” he says. When the Daily Memphian came into being in 2018, he was doing more than business-related photography. “But I found that my own time was being eaten up with shooting Tiger sports. It was great, but it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.”
Cofield decided to go out on his own and had lined up enough work to make it happen. “It’s treated me pretty well,” he says. “The pandemic was really rough and really hard on work, but luckily I have a supportive wife. And last year, work started to pick up a lot more, so things feel like they’re getting back to normal in terms of work.”
photograph by houston cofield
Weeds grow around a car wash brush behind a Goodwill store on Scott Street.
The Photographer’s Challenge
With his experience in photojournalism and art photography, Cofield has found ways to shoot images that work for his clients and himself. “In a mid-size city or in the South, you don’t have the luxury of being able to photograph a person like Jeff Bezos or some iconic figure or some really crazy beautiful sexy assignments. Much of it is trying to make something out of nothing. It depends on the person, too — some people just don’t want to be photographed. I feel like over the years I’ve gotten to a place where I can kind of push back on that a little bit.”
photograph by houston cofield
Shoveling ice from the sidewalk in Memphis for a story in The New York Times.
He’ll remind the subject that it’s his job and that for the most part, they’d agreed to do it. But he is diplomatic, knowing that he needs to make people feel comfortable. “I think I’ve gotten better over the years,” he says. “I try to be more conscious of that during the shoot instead of falling into my routine. I need to take a step back for a minute and really think what are the things I’m missing here? How do I do this differently instead of just doing what I normally do? I try and continue evolving and not just stay in the same kind of rut.”
“It shook my world. That sent me into this phase of grief and loss, so I’ve been really trying to make work about that and indirectly talk about grief and loss.” — Houston Cofield
And for the creative photographer’s mind, that’s an energizing experience. “There are so many moving parts,” he says. “Expectations have to be set aside because you don’t know the environment you’re going into, and there’s no sense in trying to preconceive a picture. You’re always going into a location that you have no clue what you’re stepping into. You don’t get to scout the room. And we’re trying for something different so you manage the relationship with the person, make them feel comfortable, because I think they are responding out of a place of discomfort or anxiety around getting their picture made. And then there’s the technical side, like how I’ll light the photo? Or how can I make an interesting photo in a place that barely has anything that I can pull into the frame? That’s what I love about it though.”
photograph by houston cofield
Birds over a marsh in Mississippi.
Grieving
In June 2019, just around the time he started freelancing, Cofield was dealt an unimaginable blow. His father, Glenn Cofield, a well-known financial services executive and civic volunteer, was shot and killed. He was leaving a charity event with his wife, Natalie, and getting into his car when he was accosted in a possible robbery attempt. No arrests have been made.
photograph by houston cofield
An empty room of a cabin in the Smoky Mountains.
“It shook my world,” Cofield says. “That sent me into this phase of grief and loss, so I’ve been really trying to make work about that and indirectly talk about grief and loss. I’m really interested in this sort of universal emotion, especially now in the pandemic. I’ve been making documentary pictures at first, like photographing my mom and photographing the flowers we got and my brothers and my wife. And then it took a turn where I was less interested in the documentary side of things.
“I’m glad to have those pictures, but I think I wasn’t trying to talk about the event itself as much as I was the emotion behind the event. I feel like I’m getting close to what I’m looking for, but it’s been a few years of responding to things in the world that feel like they connect with that grief and the pain and sadness — but without being super overt.”
For Cofield, his journey has been coming together as a book. “But it’s so hard to know when things are finished,” he says. “If you’d asked me six months ago if I was ready to publish a book, I’d say yeah, I think I could publish something.”
photograph by houston cofield
Shattered glass in the window of a store in West Memphis, Arkansas.
He went to the Chico Hot Springs Portfolio Review in Montana to show his work to publishers, artists, and photographers. Cofield says he got a good response and was told he could publish tomorrow, or he could see where this goes in five years. “There’s a lot that could be done,” he says. “I don’t want to do anything too quickly that I would regret. I’d rather publish something that’s a little more dense than something quick and let it kind of unravel.”
photograph by houston cofield
Rotten fruit that was forgotten and left in a gift basket.
So he’s allowed this exploration of grieving to go in other directions. “Lately I’ve opened it up to pictures I’ve made over the last few years. I’ve got these diptychs of the moon. And I’m thinking a lot about time and the passage of time, and grief. And then I’ve got pictures of rotten fruit.” That happened just after his father’s death when people were bringing food and flowers to the house. A basket of fruit had been shoved under a guest bed and forgotten and was smelling bad. “I was like, ‘This feels like what I’m feeling right now.’ So, I took it to the studio and shot pictures of that. There are things like that in there responding to things that feel hard and painful. I took some portraits of my mom crying, and they weren’t staged or anything, but it just felt too direct. I’m trying to be less direct about it.”
Over the past year, most of his assignments have been tough. Last August, a flash flood hit the town of Waverly, Tennessee, killing some 20 people, including 7-month-old twin boys. “I covered that funeral,” he says, “and that’s probably the toughest assignment I’ve ever had — trying to navigate how to cover this and also be extremely cautious and have an open line of communication with the family and let them decide what they wanted me to do or not do.
“I didn’t want to be invasive at all,” he continues. “Having just been through what I had been through, I was still in that grieving stage. I think that helped. The mother of the twins said I could photograph whatever I wanted. They had an open casket, the twins side by side. She wanted people to see how young these kids were. The husband was very upset — not about the pictures, but the infants were swept out of his arms, so he was in the worst place.”
Cofield was shooting that assignment for The New York Times, but was careful about what he sent in. “I didn’t feel like these needed to be published. I ended up using a picture of the casket that was more subtle.”
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photograph by houston cofield
Rapper-producer Matt Lucas for MUSE.
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photograph by houston cofield
Veterinarian Dr. Karen Emerson for The New York Times.
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photograph by houston cofield
The musician The Goddessie for MUSE.
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photograph by houston cofield
Sculptor/artist Bill Beckwith in his studio in Taylor, Mississippi.
It all figures into his thinking about what should go in his book. “I want to keep making pictures,” he says. “I hate to put stages of grief in the book, but I do think grief turns and twists a little bit and you come back to certain emotions at some point. My wife and I have a baby coming along and maybe that’s a part of the book. I’ve been shooting pictures of her pregnant and pictures of our ultrasounds and things like that. Maybe it goes in there and maybe it doesn’t, but I’m being open to whatever emotions come up and see if that evolves more.
“I just don’t feel like it’s at a closing point yet, but I’m also interested in going back to archival pictures of me and my dad and our relationship and maybe putting some of that in there too. I’d like to include him in it more as opposed to just my own process of grief.”
The circumstance of his father’s death is a complicating factor. “I don’t know if I’ve quite worked it through myself,” he says. “It’s like a separate thing. There’ve been moments where we meet with police officers and they try and give some hope. They do a good job of managing that. It’s like they try and give you something, but not get you too excited about things. There have been moments where it feels like maybe this could be closed. At the end of the day, we know enough about the person that killed my dad to make our own assumptions about how he got to their place and how this even happened. I haven’t worked through that entirely.”
photograph by houston cofield
A photo for MUSE of hip-hop artist Ash León.
Therapy
Cofield’s photography has become an avenue of therapy in dealing with his trauma. “We’re living in a violent city and living in Midtown where we can hear gunshots from our house,” he says. “I think about that on a daily basis now. And now that we’re raising a son, I feel terrified a little bit. I’m responsible for my kid and this happened to our family and my dad, my own dad, right down the street. There’s a lot of weeds to work through there, you know?”
As art, as therapy, as inspiration, it is making him see things in different ways. “As sad as it is and traumatic, I think there’s been a lot of growth in the way that I think about art,” he says. “I just have opened up and loosened up a little bit and I’m trying to have less and less control over the pictures. My loose goal for 2022 is to just shoot — be shooting on more film and letting things be more vulnerable.”
