There are few things as rich in this life as a good conversation. These conversations hold a balance between the comfort of the familiar and the revelation of something new. They are organic, not formulaic, and they grow out of an individual place and person and flourish by being shared. Good conversations recall memories, relishing the details that touched our senses and pushing below the surface towards meaning, towards value. A good photograph does the same.

Keith Carter is a conversationalist, striking a balance between the mundane and the mystical. His images are filled with allegory, revealing that Carter is not interested in just making photographs, but interested in seeing – seeing both the truth in the details and a promise of poetry. 

East Texas is where he has cultivated the vast majority of his work. His images however hold a quality that transcends time and place, evoking memory more than a document. Carter is an artist aware of the influence of a place, its changing landscape and limitations, but more importantly how a place can reveal our own limitations of wisdom, character, and strength. It is through this process of visual study that we may come to see with anagogical vision.

Like the great landscape photographers of the American West who attempted to restore our knowledge of the lost vistas; or the great storytellers who remind us of the humanity we strive for - so Keith Carter’s work pushes us beyond the details of the ordinary, and restores a sense of meaning in life.

Keith Carter is a recipient of the 2009 Texas Medal of Arts.  He holds the Endowed Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas where he is the recipient of both the Regents’ Professor Award and the Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award. He also received the Lange-Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.