![]() This was part of a series of portraits I made of Pentecostal women. When I developed the film, the combination of short focus, slow shutter speed and constant movement had produced an unexpected dreamlike effect. The results, as readers of this book will see, are anything but ordinary.įireflies is one of my favorite accidental images. So I decided then and there that I would pay attention to the ordinary things found in this ordinary place.” “It’s muddy, it’s flat, it’s dangerous, it’s mosquito-ridden, but it’s my place. “I thought, I live in a place that everyone makes fun of,” Carter recalls. Around 1985, he heard Texas playwright Horton Foote give a speech about his upbringing in the small farming community of Wharton, which became the setting for much of his writing. He began working with digital photography for the first time, expressing delight in how editing software allows him to create “anything I can dream.”Īnd while he sometimes tires of Beaumont, Carter says he could never have created his photography anywhere else. He also lost most sight in his left eye after receiving radiation treatment for ocular melanoma, a rare form of cancer. In recent years Carter lost both Pat and his mother, a professional portrait photographer who inspired his own choice of career. The resulting images, such as Carter’s portraits of Pat as she was dying from cancer, have a haunting, hallucinatory look reminiscent of 19th-century spirit photography. ![]() His most recent work included in the book was produced using the wet-collodion process, invented in 1851, which involves coating a glass plate with photosensitive chemicals and exposing it while still wet. He experimented with focus and depth of field to create fantastical images of levitating children, Rapunzel-haired Pentecostal women, figures obscured in mysterious wreaths of smoke. ![]() It was like a veil lifted from my eyes, and I saw that there was so much more there.”Ĭarter’s photographs had always been informed by regional folklore, but after “Fireflies” his visual language shifted decisively in the direction of magical realism. “That dynamited me straight out of the documentary tradition. Turned out, none of them were.” When Carter’s late wife, Pat, urged him to make a print anyway, the result proved a revelation. “But those little fellows wouldn’t hold still, so I did the photographs and developed them, hoping one of them was sharp. “I was so disappointed when I made that, because I was trying to make a sharp photograph,” Carter said. What’s unusual about the photograph is that its subjects, the boys and their jar, are blurred - the presence of fireflies only implied by the title - while their surroundings are in crisp focus. Keith Carter: Fifty YearsBy Keith CarterUniversity of Texas Press$65 320 pagesĬarter is perhaps best known for his 1992 image “Fireflies,” which shows two young boys standing ankle-deep in a shallow pond, peering into a large glass jar that they hold between them. “Memory is not linear, and I don’t think the work I’ve done is linear,” Carter said. Carter personally selected the book’s 251 images, which are drawn from the full arc of his career and arranged thematically rather than chronologically, in keeping with his quasi-mystical sense of vocation. Born in 1948 in Madison, Wisconsin, Carter moved with his family to Beaumont when he was 3 and, with only occasional interruption, has lived there ever since, documenting the people and places of East Texas in a remarkable body of work that is the subject of the new book Keith Carter: Fifty Years. Photographer Keith Carter has spent his life revealing the magical in the mundane. Over and over, Keith Carter finds transcendence in scenes of everyday East Texas life.
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