KEITH CARTER: Fireflies

Fireflies
Photograph (c) Keith Carter /All Rights Reserved

Sunglasses
Photograph (c) Keith Carter /All Rights Reserved

White Owl
Photograph (c) Keith Carter /All Rights Reserved

Pram
Photograph (c) Keith Carter /All Rights Reserved

...in 1992, Keith made “Fireflies,” in my view his first truly great, truly transcendent image. It is a photograph of two young boys in a creek bottom. They are leaning over a jar held between them. Light glows from inside the jar – the magic light of the fireflies the boys had captured at dusk on that warm summer evening. It is a picture of your brother and you. It is a picture of all of us when were still new in the world, still able to be mesmerized by the most ordinary and daily of things. It is a picture to conjure memories that in most of us have lain dormant for an eternity – remembrances of having once been at one with the natural world. Only a glance at “Fireflies” and we’re back there again, our eyes full of wonder, walking barefoot through that continuous miracle that is life, and we are exalted by the experience. That is what art at its most sublime can do –from an Essay by Bill Wittliff

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KEITH CARTER was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1948. He holds the endowed Walles Chair of Visual and Performing Arts at Lamar University Beaumont, Texas, and is the recipient of a 2009 Texas Metal of Arts Award 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.

Carter has been called "a poet of the ordinary" by the Los Angeles Times. His haunting, enigmatic photographs are included in numerous permanent collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the George Eastman House; the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston; and the Wittliff Collection of Southwestern and Mexican Photography Collection. He is author of 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, Natural Histories and Ezekiel's Horse, 2000; A Certain Alchemy, 2008; and the recent monograph Fireflies, 2009.

FIREFLIES: Photographs of Children: "In Fireflies, Keith Carter presents a magical gallery of photographs of children and the world they inhabit. The collection includes both new work and iconic images such as "Fireflies," "The Waltz," "Chicken Feathers," "Megan's New Shoes," and "Angel" selected from all of Carter's rare and out-of-print books. When making these images, Carter often asked the children, "do you have something you would like to be photographed with?" This creative collaboration between photographer and subject has produced images that conjure up stories, dreams, and imaginary worlds. Complementing the photographs is an essay in which Carter poetically traces the wellsprings of his interest in photographing children to his own childhood experiences in Beaumont, Texas. As he recalls days spent exploring in the woods and creeks, it becomes clear that his art flows from a deep reservoir of sights and sounds imprinted in early childhood. –from the University of Texas Press

KEITH CARTER WEBSITE
FIREFLIES