Biography

Described as a “poet of the ordinary” by Los Angeles Times critic Christine McKenna, Keith Carter is best known for his black-and-white photographs of little-known or overlooked details of everyday life. As he photographs children, dogs, and locales ranging from his native Texas to Paris or Venice, Carter employs selective focus to highlight the essence of a gesture, person, or place. His photographs capture enigmatic, fleeting moments as simple as a young girl in nightclothes, coins in a fountain, or one horse nuzzling another. In a recent interview, Carter stated, “I have a great affection for utter simplicity. I truly do. I look for what I think are fairly ordinary things. I’m a real big fan of Walt Whitman’s poetry and I love the whole beauty of the medium of photography, it’s democratic in nature. So, I try to exploit that. I try to give the same weight to whatever I’m working with or whatever’s in front of the camera, whether it’s a person or a safety pin.”1

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Carter grew up in Beaumont, Texas, where he lives to this day. His example of a working photographer came from his mother, who supported the family by working as the local portrait photographer. Carter’s aspirations initially lay in a different direction, and he studied business management at Lamar University in Beaumont, graduating in 1970. He is a self-taught photographer who began his career photographing the landscape and people of the South, in the venerable tradition of photographers such as Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and Eudora Welty. Carter’s work is generally shot using a Hasselblad camera with black-and-white film that he tones with selenium, resulting in a nostalgic look. Although Carter is best known for his photographs of Southern people, culture, and creatures of all types, which he assembled into books such as The Blue Man (1990), Mojo (1992), and Heaven of Animals (1995), the artist has recently ventured abroad and tackled subject matter such as gondolas in Venice, the Eiffel Tower, and Roman ruins, proving himself unafraid of dabbling in cliché. And yet, like his hero French photographer Eugène Atget, Carter manages to capture scenes using unconventional vantage points to encompass a more personal vision.

Lost Dog is one of Carter’s most poignant animal images, focusing on a bewildered dog whose large eyes are filled with fear. The photographer both conveys the animal’s intense emotion and allows us to experience it as a metaphor for human feelings. Carter’s reverence for living beings is evident in the photographs he has taken of animals over the years, images that reflect his desire to capture the sentient spirit of these creatures. In their book on the history of dog photography, Raymond Merritt and Miles Barth single out Carter as one of the most important artists in this genre of the past 150 years: “His photographs capture the dog’s uniquely unaffected consciousness and emotional life. There is a primal, even primordial, grace about his imagery. In his works we see the dog’s innate beauty—its ‘canineness.’ One senses the dog is informed, conscious, and perhaps spiritual—less complex but perhaps more complete than man.”2

Carter’s use of selective and split-focus techniques, perspective, and tonal effects results in thought-provoking, quiet images imbued with a poetic sensibility. His photography embodies his affection for everyday life—men and women, people and animals, the earth and man—presenting a romantic viewpoint tempered by an underlying conceptual and structural integrity. —J.N.

1. Jo B. Hoffman, “Ordinary Magic,” Photomarket, May 1998, 24–30.
2. Raymond Merritt and Miles Barth, A Thousand Hounds (Cologne: Taschen, 2000), 424.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Lives and works Beaumont, Texas.

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