Fault Lines: Portraits of East Austin

East Austin, just across Interstate 35 from Austin, Texas’s capital city, is a historically working-class neighborhood that in recent years has become an arts district and hotbed for real estate developers targeting a young urban population. The shops and restaurants that for decades served Latino and African American residents are being crowded out by coffee shops, cocktail bars, and upscale bakeries hoping to attract newer residents. The resulting tensions, part of a trend debated in cities across the country, have received national media attention. After years of observing the fragmentation of east Austin’s Latino and African American communities, photographer John Langmore began to chronicle the historic neighborhood and its residents. His aim was to capture the gentrifying neighborhood’s unique nature and to make Texans aware of the people and places negatively affected by the state’s growth. Fault Lines features more than a hundred color and black-and-white photographs taken between 2006 and 2010, during which time Langmore was fully aware that the window for capturing the east Austin community was rapidly closing. Indeed today many of the neighborhood places, and even the people, have been lost to development and increasing rents and property taxes. The book features a foreword by Michael King, a longtime political reporter for the Austin Chronicle; essays by east Austin resident Wilhelmina Delco, Austin’s first African American elected official and a ten-term member of the Texas House of Representatives, and Johnny Limón, a sixty-six-year resident of east Austin and a prominent member of the neighborhood’s Latino community; and an epilogue by Langmore.

About the Author :
After graduating from the University of Texas School of Law, John Langmore left Austin in 1989 for a corporate career. He returned to the city with his family in 2003 and began seriously pursuing photography. He is also civically active in Austin on matters related to urban growth. His other projects include the book Open Range: America's Big-Outfit Cowboy and the documentary film Cowboys, which he codirected and coproduced.

Review :
"John Langmore turned his lens on East Austin and discovered a rich history and community." — Austin Chronicle "Langmore focuses on those old ways, rather than on the conflict between the old and new. The East Austin portrayed here is a place of street fiestas, barbershop gossip, and Sunday morning church services, not brewpubs, fancy coffee shops, and limestone-and-brushed-nickel apartment complexes. It's a snapshot of a place that, Langmore writes, 'time will render unrecognizable to future generations.'"— Texas Monthly “When photographer John Langmore began documenting East Austin about 13 years ago, he could hardly work fast enough to take shots of decades-old establishments before they disappeared... Since he stopped taking photos for the book about eight years ago, Langmore estimates the majority of the places he featured no longer exist or have changed due to increasing rents and property taxes.”— Austin American-Statesman “This book is a real looker – and is sure to offer some solace to anyone feeling homesick for East Austin.”— Austin Chronicle "A look back a decade or so at an East Austin that already was disappearing.”— Rivard Report “In a new book of East Austin portraits, photographer John Langmore documents the neighborhood’s vibrant Black and Latinx culture. Langmore’s candid scenes show a rapidly disappearing way of life.”— Texas Observer “Langmore set out to capture that uniqueness on film and caught a changing community in the process. He said the development boom changed the face of the East Austin community, pushing out many families and businesses he captured there.” — Spectrum News Austin "Fault Lines is not angry or bitter; it's a love letter to a bygone Austin and a reminder of how complex the causes and effects of gentrification can be." — Reason Magazine