Keith Carter

(American, b. 1948)

Atlas Moth, 1990

Garlic, 1991

I normally work backwards. I make myself a title, and then I make a wide variety of photographs, and I threat them all as a portrait, but it can be a bedroom, a safety pin hanging from a string. It can be a dog, it can be something in a church. I try to weave all these various things together but unify them thematically both psychologically and visually.

— Keith Carter from an interview at Photo Metro Gallery on November 22, 1996

Deeply connected to the region and enamored of its eccentricities, Keith Carter has concentrated on East Texas (with the exception of some late 1990s photographs from Italy, France, Wales, and England) throughout his career. His subjects tend to be children and animals, or more broadly seen, Southern mystique in general. By 1990 Carter had established a characteristic style marked by a handful of hallmark elements, including a shallow depth of field that renders the majority of a picture out of focus. Working with a Hasselblad single-lens reflex camera at a proximity close to touching distance, he prints the resulting two and a quarter negatives full frame, enlarged to almost life-size in 15 inch square gelatin silver prints. Selective toning in a fair number of prints gives an added warmth and life to the pictures. 1991’s “Garlic” captures the mood if not all the technique common in Carter’s photographs. A woman holds two garlic plants in the air, their thin stalks twisting as if in movement, her clothing pieced together at the seams with loose hand stitching. The cloth of her dress is thin, covering a strong body caught in a pose both powerful and mysterious.

Keith Carter was born in 1948, and has lived in Beaumont, Texas since he was a boy. His mother was a photographer of children, transforming the family’s kitchen into her darkroom at night, but Carter didn’t think much about photography until he was 21 and borrowed a twin lens Rolliflex from her. (He would later inherit her business.) His photographs have been exhibited at Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery, Dallas; Society for Contemporary Photography, Kansas City, Missouri; Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago; Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco; and the San Jose Museum of Art, California, among others. His work is included in such public collections as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Carter holds the Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.

— Kendra Greene

Carter, Keith. Heaven of Animals: Photographs by Keith Carter. Houston, Texas: Rice University Press, 1995.

Carter, Keith. Mojo. Houston, Texas: Rice University Press, 1992.

Carter, Keith. Keith Carter Photographs Twenty-Five Years. Austin, Texas: University

of Texas Press, 1997.

Leggett, Jo. “Keith Carter Interview,” Photo Metro v. 15, Issue 143 (1997) p 4-18

Longmire, S. “Keith Carter [exhibit],” New Art Examiner v. 25 (March 1998) p. 54