What interests Keith Carter more than the stories Texas tells about itself are the everyday figures—idle kids, blue-collar workers, animals both domesticated and less so—that contribute to the state’s mythology.
The five decades that Keith Carter has spent documenting small-town Texas more than make up for the fact that he was born in Wisconsin. His family moved to the town of Beaumont when he was just a few years old, in the early nineteen-fifties, and his single mother took up commercial portrait photography to support them. Mesmerized by the red-tinted darkroom printing he witnessed in their kitchens growing up, he turned to photography after graduating from Lamar University with a business degree. He has since built a prolific career making art of and for the place he’s from. “My home town,” Carter has said, “is the backdrop for a rich East Texas storytelling culture, an occasional mystifying spirituality, and abundant folklore,” qualities that manifest themselves in the rich, allegorical images he produces.
