By Mark Edward Harris | Photography by Keith CarterIn 2018, this renowned fine-art photographer
celebrated half a century of work
Last year,
University of Texas Press published
Keith Carter: Fifty Years, which com-
piled five decades of the photographer’s search for the soul in the ordinary.
The collection of 250 images takes readers on a visual journey through
a dream world that Carter often captures in the quiet realities of daily life
around his adopted east Texas hometown of Beaumont.
While Carter, whose highly collectible work is in museums from the
National Portrait Gallery in Washington to the George Eastman Museum
in Rochester, New York, does explore the world camera-in-hand, he vows to
never end his love affair with the South and its rich storytelling traditions.Digital Photo Pro: How were
you able to take a diverse body
of work from your five-decade
career and present it so seam-
lessly between two covers?
Keith Carter: It took me about a
year thinking about what happened
when and which were the most
powerful images I’ve made.
What you did in 1992 takes on a
whole different feel when you look
at it in 2018. I got opinions from a
handful of people that are close to
me and started trying to lay it out.
I learned you’re not always the best
judge of your work.
Over a period of time, you can be.
But particularly when it’s new, it’s
good to have ot her p eople’s opinions.
The layout isn’t in chronological
order because memory doesn’t work
that way. We jump back and forth
every 20 seconds between something
that happened 10 years ago, 20 years
ago, that sort of thing.
So I tried to lay it out and make
sense of it where there were cer-
tain comparisons even though some
images were 30 years apart. Some-
times it was symbolic. Sometimes
it was visual. Then, I worked with
really good designers at Pentagram
and got their opinions. They were so
helpful in part because they looked
at it from a different standpoint.Sometimes we’re too close to
our own work. Only distance
can give a perspective.
The book starts with a wonderful
quote from Jack Kerouac from his
original scroll On the Road, which
essentially was when he and a friend
were on their way through Louisi-
ana heading toward Texas to go to
Mexico to misbehave wildly. They
crossed over the Sabine River and
into Beaumont. He writes about
being in a Hudson [car, in the dark
of] night and crossing over “the evil
old Sabine River” and wanting to get
out of “this mansion of the snake,”
which is what he called my home-
town. And I just love that.How did you end up in Beau-
mont, having been born in
Madison, Wisconsin?
My family migrated here when I was
around 4 years old. My dad, who, at
the time, was an attorney, did make
the trip down from Wisconsin but
left when I was 6 and went to Alaska
before it was a state. I didn't know
that at the time. It was a little bit
mysterious, and probably bad behav-
ior was involved. I never saw him
again. Then, he drowned up there
when I was 11, but my mother didn’t
tell me until I was 16. I wish I knew
the entire backstory, but I don’t.“Under the Moon,” 2017“Renaissance Mouse,” 1998
digitalphotopro.com November/December 2019 | 15