Cars, indelibly linked as they are to the development of American geography, take on an entirely different identity as quail rigs, post-car vehicles fashioned alike from American classics, German military trucks, or icons of global luxury.
The scope of a vanishing tradition and culture of quail hunting in Texas reaches far beyond the art of photography. Lokey traveled throughout Texas’s quail country to photograph and study the trucks, each one of the 120 plus rigs is different, and reflects the personality of its owner and builder.
His project was an opportunity to ensure a place in history for a tradition that has gone on for decades and is ever changing as the quail population and hunters grow less each year. The photographs are as much a tribute to the unique rigs and their owners as it is to an era of tradition.
The Texas Quail Rigs are as much a tradition to gentlemen hunters as the hunt itself. Today the generation of the gentlemen hunters and their rigs are slowly dying. With the lessening of the numbers of quail, the expense of leases and guides, and the aging of a generation of traditional gentlemen hunters, there is little doubt that it is a tradition that is slowly disappearing and needed to be documented for history.
http://hyperallergic.com/118345/put-texas-quail-rigs-in-the-whitney-biennial/http://www.texasquailrigs.com/
