Keith Carter

"I never felt childhood was an idyllic play in pristine green parks.  Any parent knows that children don't spend all their time laughing, smiling and playing.  Left to their own devices they are often pensive, absorbed, alarmingly attuned to the changing mood of their parents, aware when something is amiss with mom and dad, and occasionally solitary"

Keith Carter in the Introduction to Fireflies 

I think when I get round to redesigning my own website I will use this quote somewhere.  It is a much more eloquent version of something I say already about photographing children and families.  I was enthralled by Keith Carter's introduction when I first read it. His idea of childhood, of how to capture it and how to relate to children resonates loudly with with me.  And I am totally besotted with his photographs too!

Keith Carter became a commercial portrait photographer in Beaumont, Texas after growing up and watching his mother work as one too.  She bravely as it was not usual used natural light and outdoor settings as well as her studio, having set up after her husband left her and she had to make a living and bring up her children.

Carter did not want to have a shop front studio in a mall or on the high street but instead found a property with outhouses so he could live and work in the same environment, although he keeps his home and studio very separate and rarely hangs his own work in his home.  He has worked commercially as well as developing his artistic practise,  and during his lifetime has become a well known artist whose images are exhibited worldwide.

I love reading about his approach to working with children.  "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."  

I  know that often the most successful photographs I have taken of children are the ones where they have contributed in some way to the process, although it is good to read that sometimes the results are "...mediocre.  Other times the centre holds and the results are (as) graceful...".  I know from past experience that working collaboratively in any field is a good way to achieve creative and interesting results but it requires a degree of trust in oneself and more than a modicum of generosity of spirit plus patience. Children in our own culture are wildly underestimated, bought up to believe they are not capable and so grow up thinking that is the truth, which renders it the truth until their minds are changed.  It can in some cases be quite challenging to get them to open up, to believe their ideas are valid and worthy of consideration.  I wonder if the more controlling the parents are the less concentrated the children can be, the more difficult it is for me to connect with them and I do struggle under these circumstances.  If I continue working with kids then I would like to work towards being able to click in with them under any circumstances and to find a way to circumvent my own shut-down responses when I find myself in tricky dynamics.  Of course, the more I do this and the less I have to worry about the technology the better too.

Carter says, "I soon learned that kids, particularly young ones, have a short attention span.  I learned to work quickly and never to schedule an appointment near nap time.  I let them look me over when I first arrived at their homes.  I often talked to parents while bouncing a red ball and carrying a toy bag. Routinely I would sit down on the ground to let the children pick out toys from my bag and talk to me at their own eye level.  I picked backgrounds rapidly and and paid close attention to the whims of colour and tonality".    I could do worse than to write this down and keep it stapled to my sleeve so I always remember it when working with children. (And oh, by the way, it was Carter who mentioned Irving Penn and looking at his work to see a great example of grouping - written about here.)

He also talks about the difference between his colour commercial work which is happy, smiling and idyllic because that is what is clients are after and this is something I must remember if I'm to be have any success as a commercial family portrait photographer, which incidentally is not something I set out to do but it does seem to be heading that way for now.  My tendency to hone in on the less happy, less idyllic more honest moods isn't going to be what clients want all the time.  I'm always vaguely embarrassed by what I call the 'toothpaste advert' images - I've got to get over that.

He talks about his photographs sometimes touching on the darker side of childhood dreams although they in no way go anywhere neat the savagery of Roger Ballen's work where children are also sometimes present.  "My pictures occasionally tend towards the dark or solitary side.  In a world of truths and half-truths, the inhabitants might be amiss or fallen from grace, but my children inhabit a peaceable kingdom where everything that falls deserves a chance to be restored.  My children are beautiful, intelligent, sometimes sad, pensive, devastatingly perceptive, complex, occasionally humorous, always creative, and often inscrutable."  I am reminded of the desolation in James Elkin's book, What Photography Is and am struck by how very different these states of mind appear to be.

Carter's images in Fireflies are all taken on plate cameras using old technology, obviously all black and white.  Many have a very narrow depth of field and they are all square format.

I am quickly becoming really infatuated with old formats, very narrow depth of fields, oblique angles between camera and subject and the dream-like images, be they nightmares or more lyrical poetic dreams such as Carters.  I do adore his photographs and look forward to seeing some sense of influence emerge in my own work - let's hope so!

Taken directly from Fireflies: Keith Carter holds The Endowed Walles Chair of Visual and Performing Arts at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and is the recipient of a 2009 Texas Medal of Arts Award and the Lange-Taylor Prize from the Centre for Documentary Studies at Duke University.  He is the author of ten previous books...()...Carter's work is included the collections of the National Gallery of Art; the Art Institute Chicago; the Smithosian American Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the George Eastman House; and the Wittliff Collections' Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection.

All quotations are take from Fireflies By Keith Carter, University of Texas Press, 2009.
Keith Carter's website

Some thoughts...

Very quickly as I should be writing a different blog right now;  I wanted to mention something in relation to the post about Asylum of the Birds.  In it I discussed Roger Ballen's capacity for using photography and other elements to create a piece of theatre which ultimately revealed something of his inner world, a great deal of it in fact.  I think it's important for me to acknowledge that it is just as possible to express some of one's inner world without the mis-en-scene.  I guess the difference with Ballen is that he is embracing some of the less celebrated aspects of ourselves; the dirty, gritty, grubby, frightening parts of who we are, the bits we try to deny.

However, a beautiful photograph of the Taj Mahal, an example Ballen uses, may just be that but the way in which it is photographed by someone who has connected their photographic practise to their inner world will undoubtedly reveal something of himself/herself.  Everything we humans do is an expression of who we are and perhaps what we are going through at the time and so it is impossible not to reveal something about yourself in your photographs.  Our inner world seems to imprint itself on our external world even if we're not practising some form of artistic endeavour in moments of peculiar synchronicity.  (Perhaps that just depends on how you view the world.)

What makes interesting photographs however, I think, is when photographers have the ability and desire to reveal a great deal about who they are by the way they choose to photograph something, and then choose to show it to the world.  Bill Dane in the days before the internet made postcards of his work and sent them to people, democratising his art.  Vivian Maier hid her work away and showed no one at all.

The thing that is so great about using photography to express yourself, and Ballen, talks about this in his interview (which I discuss in the my previous post) is that you might take the photograph and only when you look at it later, several days or months, maybe years, after you took it, do you see or understand something about yourself.  It's a voyage of self discovery and that's a wonderful thing to embark on.

Asylum of the Birds - Roger Ballen

I have quoted Roger Ballen extensively in this post.  The quotes are mostly taken from an interview between Roger Ballen and Manik Katyal for EMAHO magazine.

  

"Most people in photography are just documenting what’s out there, you know—taking a picture of a sunset, take a picture of the Taj Mahal, take a picture of a grandmother. They don’t really use the camera to get deep inside themselves to reveal things about themselves that they really aren’t very aware of in any other way. So I think I’m really quite privileged, in a way, I’m really taking pictures of my interior." Roger Ballan, Taken from an interview with Manik Katyal for Emaho Magazine

Some friends of my parents whom we had not seen in over 30 years told me about Roger Ballen last year.  When I initially looked at the images then I found them quite difficult to relate to although I recognised a grittiness and 'dirtiness' that I liked.  I mention the family friends because they have been on quite a remarkable journey in life.  The couple have embraced something relatively alien to Western culture - a lot less materialistic than we are accustomed to – and by that I don’t just mean a rejection of monetary value but rather an appreciation of existential, unconscious, spiritual, inner landscapes – worlds of imagination, the inexplicable, the magical.  From what I understand the non-material world and how it interacts with the material one is something that Ballen is exploring, which is of course enormously interesting to me.

In her introduction to Asylum of the Birds, Ballen's latest book, Didi Bozzini says, "Ballen's photographic drama combines artifice and reality as the inseparable elements and mirror images of a poetic universe, which is in turn the mental double of the real world".[1]

Ballen's photographs are a combination of reality and fantasy although those elements may be more accurately described as Kleinien phantasy[2]. I think they are very much about what drives us, eats us up, frightens us –things we find difficult to look at in ourselves.[3]  They are black and white images showing people, although less of those in his latest book, place and animals as well as objects.  There are also drawings in the photographs which Ballen says are essential parts of the image.  The work was photographed in a real house, location undisclosed but somewhere in South-Africa, belonging to real people.  Ballen spends a great deal of time adding elements to this genuine location, creating a theatrical set – a mis-en-scene, establishing a new reality.

Ballen has stated, “Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.” [4] 

The second two sentences in the above resonate with me in relation to much of what I am learning about photography – photography is a means of exploring who you are, how you fit and how you make sense of what it is to be human – how you relate to the world.  By expressing and sharing your internal world in this way others may recognise something of it and make sense of their own place.  Ballen’s statement which I have quoted at the beginning of this post, saying that taking pictures of his interior is a privileged thing to be doing helps me to further understand what I am aiming for.  Although, I see that he uses others and objects rather than himself to explore that interior landscape.

The title of the book Asylum of the Birds was conceived early in his process, which Ballen says took 5 years.  The word asylum is an interesting one in that it means a place of refuge and a place where mad people are sent.[5]   If you place any truth in RD Laings[6] assertion that people experiencing mental illness are justifiably reacting to the way our society operates, then finding safety in madness makes perfect sense.  (As someone who suffered from extreme and debilitating anxiety in the past I can certainly testify to the fact that my own retreat to that place was about avoiding certain truths in the world – it was about denial of reality.)

This exploration of our society and also individual madness is something that preoccupies Ballen:

“He has spent most of his life documenting the social, economic and cultural impoverishments faced by his subjects, in a bold and experimental manner, taking us into the dark recesses of their minds, and in turn revealing to us our own dark sides.”[7]

Ballen seems to be looking intently at the darker sides of human consciousness and I see an apparent distrust for Western over-appreciation of all that is material, an exploration into how our society deprives us of something inherently healthy.  He discusses how our lack of connection to fantasy prevents in us something fundamentally human.

“The satisfaction of their condition is really repressed, it’s not part of the puzzle, the culture is very rational, scientific, and not very emotional, I guess emotional is a bit. Not very. The people are told very early, from childhood, not to believe in these things, that they’re just fantasy and they shouldn’t pay any attention to it. So people grow up trying to not be in contact with any other condition, and also not trying to seek it out. Whereas in a culture like India it’s absolutely prominent…”[8] 

I am reminded by Ballen, by his work, of a director I mentioned in this blog before, Robert Lepage, who tries to work in an intuitive, responsive, deeply creative way.  This is about making a space within which to work and allowing ideas to grow and form out of the process rather than starting with an imposed and structured idea.  It can be a slow process and takes time, patience and commitment.  Ballen says, “Well, it’s never— it’s never— I don’t really— when I take pictures, I don’t really have any ideas. I don’t really think, ‘what am I going to do? what am I going to take?, you know, I just do the work. And so it’s a process that takes time, and takes evolution and, you know, builds on itself basically. So it’s a great producer, it gives you other things. So it’s very much a dynamic process, rather than one that is dominated by what I want to do from the very beginning. It evolves at its own speed, in it’s own right and it’s own way and I can’t… I have no way of predicting where the picture, where the product, will end up.”[9] 

The reason for working this way is you find the unexpected.  It’s an exciting way to go about things and one that requires enormous trust and confidence.  But of course deeply rewarding when you find something of what you’d been searching for.  Ballen says, “I mean, that’s the thing, you know—the untouchable, the invisible. I mean once you try—at least, what I’m trying to do, is trying to make the invisible visible. Well, it’s mysterious to me, trying to make them a little more concrete, a little bit more evident. So, yeah, photography helps me explain parts of my psyche, parts of my experience, helps me concretize these in some way. So, you know, it’s all sorts of parts of myself there. And that I wasn’t really aware of and you’ve woken up parts of yourself that you weren’t even aware of. It’s a very gratifying experience.”

Looking through Ballen’s Asylum of the Birds is disturbing – where are these people from, who are they, what are all these birds about?  There is a celebration of death, of the darker side of our psyche, of nightmares, of fear.  Not in a gratuitous way – I don’t mean Ballen is trying to scare us; he’s simply sharing those aspects of ourselves which we have become unaccustomed to looking at in our post modern society.  He owes much to the Surrealists but also to something more tribal, ancient and primeval.

It has been interesting to look at Ballen’s work more closely and understand what is driving him.  He is more than a photographer, incorporating drawing, installation, mis-en-scene, combining reality with ‘phantasy’[10] and an enormous dose of himself.  For me this is extremely interesting; how far can I combine my theatre background with photography.  I have used my self in the previous two assignments and will undoubtedly continue with that as I define and redefine who I am.  It is good to look at Ballen’s concepts as it continues to broaden my understanding of what is possible, of what artists do, how they choose to work, how they choose to share who they are with the world.

I have over time and especially lately really begun to understand how personal photography can be; how it is a fundamental expression of the photographer or artist - what they choose to shoot, how they choose to shoot it, how they choose to show it, what order, what context – all of these things are capable of being an exceptionally powerful expression of who is making those pictures.  I think Ballen is a good example of a tremendously personal and generous artist who is literally showing us his inner world.  What a wonderful thing to be able to do.

Information taken from:

Asylum of the Birds by Roger Ballen

Emaho Magazine

Douglas Stockdale Photobook Blog

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[1] Asylum of the Birds, Roger Ballen, Thames and Hudson, 2014

[2] In Kleinian theory unconscious phantasies underlie every mental process and accompany all mental activity. They are the mental representation of those somatic events in the body that comprise the instincts, and are physical sensations interpreted as relationships with objects that cause those sensations. Phantasy is the mental expression of both libidinal and aggressive impulses and also of defence mechanisms against those impulses. Much of the therapeutic activity of psychoanalysis can be described as an attempt to convert unconscious phantasy into conscious thought.

Freud introduced the concept of unconscious phantasy and phantasising, which he thought of as a phylogenetically inherited capacity of the human mind. Klein adopted his idea of unconscious phantasy but broadened it considerably because her work with children gave her extensive experience of the wide-ranging content of children's phantasies. She and her successors have emphasised that phantasies interact reciprocally with experience to form the developing intellectual and emotional characteristics of the individual; phantasies are considered to be a basic capacity underlying and shaping thought, dream, symptoms and patterns of defence.  (Taken from http://www.Melanie.Klein.org.uk/theory)

[4] The Photobook – Douglas Stockdale’s blog

[5] Emaho Magazine interview

[6] RD Laing – influential psychiatrist in the 60s who famously stated that madness was a justifiable response the society in which we live.

[7] Emaho Magazine interview

[8] Emaho Magazine interview

[9] Emaho Magazine interview

[10] See footnote 2

He has spent most of his life documenting the social, economic and cultural impoverishments faced by his subjects, in a bold and experimental manner, taking us into the dark recesses of their minds, and in turn revealing to us our own dark sides. - See more at: http://www.emahomagazine.com/2014/10/roger-ballen-maybe-i-can-speak-goat-and-i-can-speak-a-little-chicken/#sthash.Vyi17cqq.dpuf