By LYNETTE HAALAND, Four Points News

Long before Cindy Gallien became the founder of Photo Texas Photography, before she built a company that now photographs hundreds of schools across Texas, before she became a trailblazer in an industry dominated by men, she was a quiet little girl in Beaumont who noticed when someone else was struggling.

With that same care and determination, she started Photo Texas Photography 27 years ago, and it would go on to impact thousands and thousands of lives. She moved the company headquarters from Anderson Mill to River Place in 2013 and then to Bell Mountain Drive in 2021, after Gallien realized less office space was needed after the pandemic.

Gallien lived in River Place for more than two decades before moving to Georgetown. Her daughter and son both graduated from Vandegrift: Katy was part of the first graduating class of 2012, and Matthew was part of the VHS class of 2015.

A Quiet Girl Who Paid Attention

Gallien says she did not even speak until she was in third grade. She was self-conscious, she says, partly because she grew up economically disadvantaged and was sometimes made fun of.

But while she may not have been talking much, she was paying attention.

In first grade, her teacher, Mrs. Frost, had a rule: Students who did not finish their work on the chalkboard could not go to recess. Gallien finished quickly because her mother had already taught her to read and work with numbers. A classmate struggled to finish his work and would become nervous.

Gallien could not stand watching him miss recess.

“I would cry, and I would beg the teacher to let me help him,” she recalled. Eventually, the teacher relented and allowed Gallien to stay and help her classmate.

It was an early glimpse of a trait that would follow her throughout her life: She noticed what needed to be done, and then she did something about it.

Another teacher recognized the same determination.

Gallien says she was a poor speller and routinely scored around 80 on spelling tests. One day, her English teacher called her to the desk.

“I bet you couldn’t make a 100 on your spelling test if your life depended on it,” the teacher told her.

For Gallien, that was not an insult. It was a challenge.

She earned a 100. The teacher challenged her to do it again. Then she added two extra words. Eventually, Gallien was getting 10 extra words on her tests and was helping other students who were struggling.

That teacher also helped Gallien improve her grammar, spelling and sentence structure — skills Gallien credits with changing her life.

“Just Go Win”

Then came volleyball.

Gallien was an all-state player and captain of her Beaumont French High School team, which won a state championship. It was the early 1970s, before Title IX opened many of the opportunities that would later become available to female athletes.

When Gallien arrived for the state tournament, she saw orange decorations around the University of Texas gym. She assumed they had been put up because her team was expected to win — her school colors were orange.

Then she asked her coach how many teams were in the tournament.

“Four,” the coach told her. “This is the state championship,” Gallien remembers being told. “Just go win.”

Gallien had been invited to try out for the Olympics, but coming from a modest family, she had no realistic way to get to Los Angeles. Instead, she stayed home, worked and attended Lamar University.

She worked 40 hours a week while going to college and finished her degree in three years because that was how far her money would stretch.

Her first career was education. She earned a master’s degree in school administration and was on a path
toward becoming a principal.

Then, in 1979, Gallien says Beaumont schools refused to integrate, and she decided she could no longer be part of the system.

“I’ve got to go make a difference in the world,” she remembers thinking.

She left education.

The next chapter began with a man who had been taking Gallien’s school photographs since she was a child. Roger Wynn — father of former Austin mayor Will Wynn and a family friend — offered her a job in
photography.

Gallien’s first reaction was disbelief.

She had never taken a photography class. She could not afford a camera.

Wynn told her he would teach her and provide a camera. The job came with none of the security she had known in education — no contract, retirement or health insurance. Gallien’s mother was understandably concerned.

Gallien, however, went to work.

She quickly discovered she had a talent for the business side of photography. During her first week, she signed up a football team, drill team, cheerleaders and volleyball team for Saturday photography sessions.

Wynn’s male employees were not impressed.

One of them apparently thought Gallien was foolish. Wynn told him to be quiet.

She was already proving herself.

After years working alongside Wynn in the business, Gallien saw the coming of the digital age in the
mid-90s and knew advancement in the industry had to take place. She approached the president of the
company with ideas and a resolution to embrace the digital change, but her ideas were rejected.

Breaking into a Man’s Industry

By 1999, Gallien started building her own company and she eventually became the first woman in Texas to own/operate a school photography business, and the road was not always easy. She recalls being chased around a desk by a man, receiving inappropriate propositions and being subjected to behavior she refused to tolerate.

She kept going.

Years later, her female employees presented her with a wooden trophy with a light on it. “You’ve been a light in this industry,” they told her.

The trophy still sits on her desk.

Today, Gallien is the founder of Photo Texas Photography, which has grown into one of the largest school photography companies in the country. The company works with between 800 and 900 schools across Texas, according to Gallien, and employs about 50 full-time employees and as many as 134 people during its busiest season.

The company says its work is guided by a simple philosophy: Every student in front of the camera is the most important child in the world to someone.

More Than a Photograph

That philosophy is not simply a slogan.

Gallien talks about photographs as memories that can become priceless when life changes unexpectedly. After a tragic shooting involving a recent graduate, Photo Texas Photography immediately gathered every
photograph it had of the student and provided them to the family. After the Steiner Ranch fires, the company printed photographs for families who had lost their homes.

Gallien knows what photographs represent.

They are not just pictures.

They are what people reach for when everything else is gone.

Her concern for children also drives the company’s approach to privacy and safety. Photo Texas Photography conducts background checks on employees, emphasizes data protection and has eliminated practices such as putting students’ photographs on backpack identification cards.

Gallien also has become involved in the larger school photography industry. She helped found School Photographers of America and has served in leadership roles with the organization, which focuses on professional standards and issues facing school photographers, including safety, data protection, background checks and the growing challenges posed by artificial intelligence.

Building a Team —
Then Learning to Step Away

But for all the numbers and accomplishments, Gallien still talks about her business in the language of a teacher and coach.

She tells employees that everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them, fix them and move forward.

And she frequently quotes legendary basketball coach Pat Summitt: “It is not individuals that make teams great. It is teams that make individuals great.”

Gallien has spent much of her life building teams.

She also has spent the past several years learning when to step away from them.

The man who taught her photography once told her that someday she would be older and a new
principal would come into a school. He told her she would need to let younger people become that
principal’s person.

For years, Gallien couldn’t imagine doing that. She loved the relationships. She loved building the business.

But over the past several years, she has deliberately stepped back, allowing younger members of her team to take over relationships she once managed herself. She still receives messages. She still helps make decisions. She still thinks about the future. But she no longer needs to be in the office every day.

It is another lesson in leadership: Build something strong enough that it can continue without you
standing in the middle of it.

The Lesson That Never Changed

Gallien’s own story began with a little girl who could not bear to watch another child struggle.

More than six decades later, that instinct remains at the center of everything she does.

“The kid sitting in front of the camera is the most important child in the world to someone,” Gallien says.

Every decision she makes, she says, comes back to that child.

If it helps serve that child better, she wants to do it. If it doesn’t, she doesn’t.