Winningham celebrates 50 years of teaching at Rice — and 60 years of photographing it

Geoff Winningham ‘63 found his place at Rice University through photography: first, as an undergraduate who dusted off his adolescent interest in cameras to become the official photographer for the Campanile, and later as a photography professor who returned to his alma mater in 1969.

Geoff Winningham ’63 graduated with an English degree before returning to teach photography.

Winningham is now the Lynette S. Autrey Chair in the Humanities, and in July he will celebrate 50 years of teaching Rice students everything from darkroom development skills to digital layout design. The shelves of his office on the second floor of the Rice Media Center, a low-slung space with a pleasant amount of natural light, are filled with photo books from students across the years. He can recall, book and page, his favorite images and he shuffles through them with deftness and delight.

It almost didn’t happen this way. After graduating with an English degree, Winningham planned to become a lawyer. Without the influence of one Rice professor, Winningham could very well have added “esquire” to his name. Perhaps he would have pursued photography only as a hobby, like he’d done as a young teen.

Gerald O’Grady, who died earlier this year, was a popular English professor at Rice between 1962 and 1967. He was hired away by the University at Buffalo, where he founded its media study program, but O’Grady returned to assist in the creation of the Rice Media Centerat the request of its patrons, Jean and Dominique de Menil, in 1969.

“Make life an adventure,” Winningham tells his students. (Photo by Brandon Martin)

The February before he graduated, O’Grady — whom Winningham said had “become a dear friend and a mentor” by then — asked his English student what he planned on doing. When Winningham told O’Grady he’d been accepted to law school, O’Grady’s response was swift: “Why would you do that?”

“Why don’t you be a photographer?” Winningham recalled O’Grady asking him. “That seems to be what you love.”

“What good would that do anybody?” Winningham asked. “And he gave me the answer for the ages: He said, ‘It would give people pleasure and yourself as well.’”

Today, Winningham tries to communicate that same message to his own students. “Make life an adventure” has become something of a mantra, a reminder that a life spent pursuing one’s pleasures can be a life that’s meaningful, well-lived and, indeed, full of adventure.

“I have never loved teaching like I love teaching now,” said Winningham, shown in the Fourth Ward during one of his photo strolls through Houston. (Photo by Brandon Martin)

Had he not picked this path, endeavors such as the Pozos Art Project — where Winningham, co-founder and artist Janice Freeman and their students teach art skills to Mexican children — may have never existed. Books that are now considered classic studies in black and white photojournalism — “Friday Night in the Coliseum” covering professional wrestling and “Rites of Fall” covering high school football in the 1970s — would never have been published.

Certainly the shelves in his Rice Media Center office wouldn’t have been filled with photographs by Winningham’s students, many of whom recently took his popular Photography in the Community course. There, he’s teaching his own students to pay it forward by mentoring young photographers in Houston public schools.

The last 50 years, Winningham said, have gone by in the blink of an eye — or perhaps the click of a shutter. But if anything, the passage of five decades has only given Winningham a deeper well of experience to draw from when he’s in the classroom, and he’s as invigorated by the process as ever.

“I have never loved teaching like I love teaching now,” Winningham said.