Magic Show: Photographer Bill Wright reflects on his art during gallery show at the Grace

Photographer Bill Wright will never forget the excitement of seeing that first print magically appear in the developer tray.

“I was probably about 8 or 9 years old, back in sixth grade. I had been shooting pictures with my mother's photo camera. She knew that I had an interest in photography, and I wanted to begin to develop pictures,” he recalled.

Wright spoke to an audience of admirers and photography fans July 11 at the Grace Museum. His show, “Bill Wright’s Texas Luminous Landscapes," has been on display since March 21 in the gallery named in honor of him and his late wife, The Alice and Bill Wright Photography Gallery. The exhibit runs until Sept. 21.

Continuing his story, he described how his mother found a local photographer and arranged for her son to drop by and watch him work.

“I really hate to say this about my mother, but I think she probably wanted to get rid of me for the afternoon,” Wright quipped, eliciting laughter around the room.

Under the orange safelights of the darkroom, the budding photographer watched the older one with the sort of intensity only the young can muster.

“I could see that picture coming up out of the developer, and it was just like magic. I mean it was supernatural, almost, and it just took me,” Wright said.

A successful Abilene businessman, in 1989 he decided to take his side hustle mainstream, selling his business interests, according to a 2013 interview Wright gave to Humanities Texas. Since then, Wright’s photography has taken him all around the world but always back to Abilene.

A tireless advocate of photography, he’s invited numerous guest artists to lecture and exhibit at the Grace.

“I did it as just a love of the art,” he said of his lifelong passion. “I really think that there is a singular message from a piece of art.

“I say singular. There might be 20 messages from the same piece of art, but there's not another piece of art that has that same relationship to you, and it may not have the same relation to somebody else.”

And the photographer who started him down this path?

“I know the house. I know everything but the name of that person,” he said, then added in an emotional voice, “I'd give anything so I could tell him what all this meant to me.”