Panhandle Magazine: Spring 2021

BY Nick Gerlich

I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I knew I loved photography, said Amarillo photographer Jim Livingston said. “I Googled ‘photography programs,’ and Amarillo College popped up. I thought, well… why not?”

After three years of courses, he emerged with a Certificate in Photography, a badge of honor he wears proudly. It is what caused him to be traveling around the Panhandle during February’s snow storms taking photos while everyone else was home trying to stay warm.

While that is the short story of how Livingston embarked on his career, the story of how he got here in the first place, and where he’s going next, is far longer.

From St Louis, With Love Livingston was born in St Louis in 1966, along the 1933 alignment of that historic highway through town. He finds it ironic that he finds himself today along that same

Jim Livingston:

In The Viewfinderribbon of pavement, even though the federal designation has long since expired. He is a partner in the Route 66 Information Center on Southwest 6th Avenue (Route 66), and he takes it as an omen that just took a while to come true. Fortyseven years, to be exact.

At the age of 12, his father received a job offer with the Ben E. Keith Company in Texas and was given the choice between relocating to either Grapevine or Wichita Falls. In the late-70s, Wichita Falls was considered the city that had the most upside potential, so they moved there.

It was two years later that his sister gave him an analog Pentax K1000 camera, igniting a passion inside. He fell in love with photography, and, as luck would have it, their next door neighbor was a serious photographer with his own dark room.

“I’d go out and shoot a roll of black and white film, and he would help me process and print the photos. He taught me everything I needed to know about the dark room,” Livingston recalled. “I lived to be a photographer as a teenager. I even hammered broom handles into the ground in our backyard so I could practice with depth of field.”

University life then beckoned, finding Livingston attending St Thomas University in Houston, the University of Dallas, Gonzaga and Midwestern State, ultimately earning a double major in his undergraduate years and then an MDiv, as he had felt a calling into ministry.

To El Salvador and Back Livingston found himself in Portland, Oregon, doing ministerial work for a short time and was then reassigned to do photographic work in El Salvador for nine months. It was there, during a period of severe political upheaval, that he grew tired of what he was seeing. “When I came home [in 1990], I threw my camera away. I did not want to look through a viewfinder again,” he stated emphatically.

Upon his return, he decided he no longer wanted to toil in the ministry. “I didn’t want to teach theology anymore,” he said. “I did teach at Notre Dame High School for a bit,

but I decided to return to school to study sociology. My intention was to one day get my PhD in that field, because I wanted to understand society.”

His plans changed, though, and he wound up working for the state of Texas as a mental health professional in Wichita Falls. “I did social work for a number of years, then screwed up my back really badly. I broke a bunch of bones and had problems working. In 2002 I became fully disabled,” Livingston continued.

Soon after that he started working for a bondsman in Wichita Falls. “I was familiar with the court system. I did the legal end of all the work in the office,” he explained, but this was short-term as he grew weary of the system and heard the road calling.

I was homeless. I was living on the road with my camera and sleeping in my Jeep.

On the Road “I took off in my Jeep and for the next nine months I lived out of my vehicle. I had a cheap camera and started taking pictures of state parks. That’s how I got back into photography,” Livingston said with a smile. It was a new chapter to a story whose first act had not ended well. continued on page 13

Livingston went on: “I was homeless. I was living on the road with my camera and sleeping in my Jeep. It’s all I had to do.” He found it to be therapeutic and healing, and he picked up right where he had left off. Turns out operating a camera is a lot like riding a bicycle.

“I saw how beautiful Bryce Canyon was, the coast of Oregon. It allowed me to refocus. That 1.5-inch viewfinder became my magic window to see the world as beautiful again,” Livingston beamed. He bounced up and down the road, living in places as farflung as Montana and Alaska.

one I brag about the most is the certificate from AC. I learned so much from those professors. It was really training me to be a career photographer. In this field, no one cares about your degree. They care about your photography.”

Livingston then found himself doing an art show at an Amarillo coffee shop, displaying photographs of 64 people for the then-nascent “I Am Project’’ in which he asks people to answer three questions: I Am, I Regret, and Before I Die.

Those 64 told their friends, and within 11 months, Livingston had photographed 1100 persons.

By the Book Not exactly sure what to do with it all, he pitched “I Am the Panhandle” as a book project. “I wound up with 37 rejection letters,” he said sadly. For the man who says he has never lived inside the box, never done anything considered normal, Livingston took that as motivation to keep going anyway. He had nothing to lose and reformulated the project to focus on Route 66 people between Chicago and Santa Monica.

He had a $1000 monthly disability check, so it wasn’t exactly a pauper’s journey without food or gas money. “I’ve got friends all over the US, and I did a lot of couch surfing. It was an inconvenience, but it gave me the ability to travel all over the US.”

Amarillo by Morning On March 31, 2013, Livingston and his Jeep rolled into Amarillo, and that’s when he felt the bug to look for photography programs. Not exactly expecting to find one only minutes from where he had just landed, he looked at it more closely, enrolled and got an apartment nearby. “I lived on a pallet of blankets for about five months before I could afford anything. All the furniture in my apartment was from the back alley. It was the best decision of my life. I wish I had done it years ago,” Livingston said with a hint of remorse.

Although he wound up one course short of an AA degree, Livingston has nothing but praise for AC. “Of all the degrees I have, the

Today, Livingston is collaborating with this writer to make the “I Am Route 66 Project” become a published reality as well as a traveling art show up and down the Route. It is one that builds bridges between the known and the unknown, the old and the young, the dreamers and the doers that span this road etched in American history.

As for Livingston shooting photos in blinding snowstorms, just chalk it up to his insatiable desire to continually hone his skills and build his portfolio. “The only reason I went out there was to shoot landscape photos,” he said with pride of his new home. “I rarely get to see the Panhandle with snow, and I wasn’t going to miss that for the world. That’s what makes life worth living for me.”

WWW.PANHANDLEMAGAZINE.COM | SPRING 2021