9/20/10 Monday

Keith Carter

These images were selected from his book, Heaven of Animals. I think these images present the human/animal relationship very well. It displays emotion and attachment and intimacy.

BIO:

Keith Carter is an internationally recognized photographer and educator. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1948,he holds the endowed Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University Beaumont, Texas. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Regional Survey Grants and the Lange-Taylor Prize from The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In 1997 Keith Carter was the subject of an arts profile on the national network television show, CBS Sunday Morning. In 1998, he received Lamar University's highest teaching honor, the University Professor Award, and he was named the Lamar University Distinguished Lecturer.

Eight monographs of his black and white photographs have been published: From Uncertain To Blue, 1988; The Blue Man, 1990; Mojo, 1992; Heaven of Animals, 1995; and Bones, 1996. A mid-career survey, Keith Carter Photographs - Twenty Five Years was published in 1997; Holding Venus and his eighth book, Ezekiel's Horse, were published in 2000.

"Called "a poet of the ordinary" by the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Carter's haunting, enigmatic photographs have been widely exhibited in Europe, The U.S., and Latin America. They are included in numerous permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the George Eastman House; the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston; and the Wittliff Collection of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University." QUOTES: "Keith was trying to express ineffable things now, things like his love of music and myth and mystery, things like the internal lives of animals, things like those fragments of universality that can sometimes be gleaned from between the lines of great poetry. The resulting photographs were not so much asking you to observe, as before – now they were inviting you to participate, to open the door and come on in. Look at “Garlic” or “Giant” or “Alice;” look at “Cosmos” or “Luna” or “Horse and Wolf” or “Holding Venus” or “Sky and Water”…It’s not that these pictures are telling you things you didn’t already know, but rather that – like “Fireflies” – they’re reminding you of things you’ve deep down always known but somehow forgotten, because life has a nasty habit of simply becoming too daily, too dependent on thought at the expense of feel. These photographs fill you up and become a part of your inner life, depending on the depth of your own capacities. The proof is that the first response to the best of Keith’s images – and to all great art – is almost always an instant YES, and instant recognition of that which was already there inside you on some profound connecting thread that runs through the very core of all of us as fellow travelers on this spinning globe. That’s how great art in any medium slips past all boundaries of time and space and cultural differences to deliver the goods." (Courtesy of Bill Wittliff, Austin,Texas) Wittliff, Bill. Keith Carter Photographs. http://www.keithcarterphotographs.com/biography.html "So, in addition to his pictures of people, when Carter photographs a dog (he's done many), a horse (ditto), or even some flowers in a vase or a dress hanging on a wall, he does it in a way that sweetly connects the viewer to the subject and warmly holds you close to it." Brickman, David. Get Visual. http://dbgetvisual.blogspot.com/2010/01/keith-carter-at-esther-massry-gallery.html

http://www.keithcarterphotographs.com/dvd.html


Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th St. Suite 1406
New York, New York 10022