Carters in SF MOMA Show

From November 29, 2012 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is showing the following 4 William Carter prints. Part of Carter’s “Humanity” series, as represented in his book Causes and Spirits, these photographs are in SF MOMA’s permanent collection and can be seen in the rooms displaying the Museum’s ongoing series, “Picturing Modernity.” View the photographs here.

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New Photo Blog Series:

"The Middle Americans"

"...I was inspired, in this fall of 2012, to dig beyond the book, into my Americana files. I found seventy-plus black-and-white images that I'll be sharing in blog postings over the next several weeks. Enjoy - and perhaps recognize?"

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5     Part 6      Part 7

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GREAT REVIEW:

"AS SOLID AND REFRESHING A BOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHY AS WE ARE LIKELY TO ENCOUNTER THIS DECADE"

--Photography News

“William Carter’s half-century career,” writes Matt Damsker in the authoritative Photography News, contributes “strongly and compassionately to the visual grammar with places as disparate as the American West and the Midwest, Europe, the Middle East, and India.” Causes and Spirits, a “capstone” work of a fifty-year career, exemplifies “clarity, crispness and unpretentious style...Carter’s heartfelt testament to who he is and where he’s been” adding “nothing flashy or ego-driven” but rather “deliberate craft and humanistic commitment...”

In Causes and Spirits “Carter’s street photography sweeps us through the cities and mid-century moments of his professional heyday. Children glimpsed from the windows of New York’s Lower East Side, the lunchtime loungers of Midtown, the down-and-outers of the Bowery, the idle elderly in Washington Square, and all the equivalent humanity glimpsed in Illinois, Seattle, Ireland, Italy, and the Middle East: these are Carter’s ultimate subjects, portrayed in nearly every case with an unforced naturalism and technical rigor. The sharp, high-contrast exposures and clean, unfussy composition never fail to focus our viewing eye on the everyday drama of global life-as-lived.”

“Yet Carter’s rhetoric is subdued, avoiding in-your-face pathos... his unsentimental feel for the urban relaxes in lush pastorals...’Decades of exposure to gritty photojournalism, and to Hindu and Buddhist understandings, had proved to me that the ‘real’ world never really changes,’ Carter writes toward the end of this generously chronicled photo-journey, adding at one point, ‘Attitude is everything.’  With so much visual evidence, it is hard to argue with Carter’s assessment of the world and his place in it. “Causes and Spirits” is as solid and refreshing a book of photography as we are likely to encounter this decade.”

Read the entire review by Matt Damsker here.

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Read an interview with William Carter in the June/July issue of Artillery Magazine.

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May, 2012: For our German-speaking friends, here is an article about William Carter, including some of his photographs,
from the German magazine Rheinkulture.

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April, 2012: the following major museums are currently acquiring William Carter photographs into their permanent collections:

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California

Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany

 

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The March 2012 issue of The Sun Magazine featured a William Carter photograph of a Yemeni tribesman from 1964 (below). In his blogpost, "Them vs. Us, and Beyond." Carter writes, "In the 48 years since taking these pictures, along hundreds of others across the region, I have often reflected how long it is taking the Americans (and the British before them) to begin to comprehend the intricacies and staying power of tribal relationships throughout the Middle East and Asia -- and to understand the near-futility of trying to transform these insular societies, in our lifetimes, into Western-style democracies."

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Here are other reviews and comments about Causes and Spirits:

"Many people take photographs, some publish their work. But you have taken my breath away with your magnificent selection of fifty years of framing your lens with such accuracy and humanity. You bring to mind Henri Cartier Bresson and others who have been able to transfer their compassion, their observations onto film. To the multitude this sounds easy, but few are able to show what they feel deeply and are able to see differently from others." --Anonymous

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"Causes and Spirits is Carter’s fifth book and spans his 50-year career to date. The collection of images comes from places as diverse as London in the 60s, New York City, Iraq, Italy, and Egypt but they are all tied together by Carter’s one common theme, humanity.

"The autobiographical text that accompanies the images reveals the connections between each photograph while Carter’s anecdotal tales enrich and add to their deeply personal feel. Carter’s images are varied but all are beautiful and all seem to unearth a facet of the human condition, a wonderful collection of photographs." —Jemima Greaves in Black and White UK, November 2011

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"Lastly, William Carter: Causes and Spirits (Steidl, £52), in which the Los Angeles-born photographer casts his eye over a 50 year career in photojournalism. Images from around the globe gain immeasurably from his autobiographical notes, which call on Dante, TS Eliot and the Pacific seacoast to explain his attention to the secret miracles of daily life." —Lucy Davies, London Daily Telegraph, October 23, 2011

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Below: William Carter's photo of a Kurdish tribesman was published on the cover of the December, 2011 issue of The Sun Magazine. The image is of a local dignitary favorable to the cause of Kurdish independence from the Iraqi government, shot on assignment for LIFE Magazine in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1965.

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For a display of the many years of Carter's Sun photographs, click here.

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In 2010 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired 10 William Carter photographs from the Causes & Spirits series.

View the SFMOMA holdings here.

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Photographs from the Causes and Spirits series were included in the exhibition:

Engaged Observers

 June 29 - November 14, 2010 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles