Earlie Hudnall Jr, born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, has lived in Houston, Texas since the early 1970s. After two years in the Marine corps from 1966 – 1968, Earlie enrolled at Texas Southern University where he received a BA in Art Education.

He has been actively photographing for almost thirty years and his photographs have been part of numerous exhibitions, including Free Within Ourselves: African American Art in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; and a solo show, Project Galveston: Earlie Hudnall Jr. and the Children of the Galveston Housing Authority. His images are in many fine collections – The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Hudnall is the university photographer for Texas Southern University and is on the executive boards of the Houston Center for Photography and the Texas Photographic Society.

"I chose the camera as a tool to document different aspects of life: who we are, what we do, how we live, what our communities look like. Various patterns are interwoven like a quilt into important patterns of history. A unique commonality exists between young and old because there is always a continuity between the past and the future.

The camera really does not matter – it’s still just a tool. What is important to me is the ability to transform an instant – a moment – into a meaningful, expressive, and profound statement – some personal, some symbolic, and some universal. My photographs are archetypes of my own childhood. They represent a literal transciption of actuality – the equivalent of what I saw or felt. The viewer can accept the image as one’s own and respond emotionally and aesthetically to the captured image."

Bio courtesy of www.cpw.org. Link to bio: http://www.cpw.org/artists/earlie-hudnall-jr/