Photographs: Twenty-Five Years
From an ordinary East Texas town, Keith Carter has been pulling magic through his camera for a quarter-century. Commonplace subjects--especially children and animals--take on numinous presence in his pictures. "I believe in wonder," he writes. "I look for it in my life every day; I find it in the most ordinary things." His technique is simple; at its most exotic, in his latest photographs, focus is deliberately limited to a small band, with everything else in the image left soft and blurry. But these pictures, basically straightforward shots made with a square-format camera, derive their most important quality not from technique but from an innocent recognition of magical moments. This book of photographs from four previous books and newly published work attests that, although his subjects all come from within a certain geographic region, Carter is no regionalist limited to the folkways and myths of a place. His pictures exert a sensual appeal that is universal. Like all the very best photographers, he captures something new and fresh in common experience.Gretchen Garner