Keith Carter
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
I wander the streets. I do not know where I am going. I seem to have lost my bearings, yet all I see seem strangely familiar. Perhaps I traipsed through this street a long time ago. I must have. Without much thought, I turn to the left. More of the same. I turn to the right. The surrounding is wildly different. The light is going. I see a few shadows. I turn to where I came from. The street is gone. Where am I?
I’ve always loved those small fragments of paper that Fox-Talbot used in his early experiments making his “shadow pictures” – what we call photograms. Where I live, near the Big Thicket in East Texas, everything either flies, slithers, buzzes, or stings, hence some of my subject matter. Mostly, I was just trying to replicate the beautiful mottled tonality of some of photography’s pre-history images.
Images by Keith Carter. Additional text excerpted from Michael George’s interview with Carter.