Photographer Keith Carter
The Life, Methods, and Work of a Texas Artist
A self-taught photographer turns Beaumont's small-town life into visual poetry.
Keith Carter, a Texas native with a modest background, became a world-class artistic photographer. Many years later, he has not forgotten his roots; Carter still lives with his wife in Beaumont, Texas. He transforms the mundane details of small-town life into the sublime, revealing mystical, quirky, and difficult facets of human (and animal) nature.
The Artist’s Life
Carter grew up watching his single mother scrape by as a child portrait photographer, but he never considered photography as a possible career for himself until college. At age twenty-one, the light in one of his mother’s prints caught his eye and inspired him to begin photographing his own pictures. For 15 years afterwards, he assisted his mother’s business around the state.
With no formal photography training, Carter learned to make art from a mentor and his own investigations. A local sculptor let him borrow from a private library of art books and literature. Carter would try to match the tonal range of famous photographs in his own prints. When he was twenty-five, he went to New York with special access granted to the archived prints at the Museum of Modern Art. He spent three weeks examining the work of great photographers first-hand.
Despite the lack of an artistic photography community in Texas at the time he began his work, Carter decided to make his home state the center of his artistic world. According to Carter, he “started looking at where I lived as an exotic land, almost as an allegory.” (Keith Carter Photographs, Introduction)
Carter is a husband and teacher. He is a professor at Lamar University and also teaches workshops. His work is represented around the world and in the permanent collections of many leading art museums.
Methods
Carter creates his images on the large, square negatives of a single-lens reflex Hasselblad camera. This camera allows him to make better quality large prints (even life-size), and the heavy machine is still small enough to operate as a hand-held device.
Blurring and limited depth of field are often incorporated into Carter’s work. This contributes to the mystery of his photographs, strongly emphasizes the area in-focus, and creates the sense that time and movement have just barely been captured for the viewer.
Work
Keith Carter has published nine monographs, including Bones, Ezeikel's Horse, Mojo, and Holding Venus. People, especially children, and animals are frequently the subject matter of his pictures.
He says of his art, “These days I treat everything as a portrait, whether it’s a safety pin hanging from a string in a woman’s bedroom, or a man witching for water in a field. They’re the same.” (Keith Carter Photography, Fragments) Carter’s eye for unique portraiture is apparent in the way his work interacts with his subjects, often making the viewer ask questions. He draws on the emotional life of his subjects.
In addition to his portrait work and his fascination with the Texas landscape, Carter has a series entitled “Talbot’s Shadow”. These works, in which he places objects on sensitized paper and creates an image without a camera, have the same unsettling, beautiful quality as his photographs created in the camera.
To learn more and see examples of Carter’s work, go to the artist’s website.
Source:
- Carter, Keith. Keith Carter Photographs: Twenty-Five Years. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.
