Keith Carter

Keith Carter was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1948 and raised in Beaumont, Texas, where he has spent nearly his entire career and which remains the base for the deeply regional body of work that defines his reputation. Largely self-taught as a photographer, Carter built an international following for his distinctive black-and-white images — dogs, angels, dolls, rural East Texas figures, and animals — printed with a soft-focus, dreamlike quality that draws as much from the Southern Gothic literary tradition as from documentary photography. Carter's photographs have been widely exhibited internationally and collected by major museums, and he has published numerous photography books over his career, several of which — signed and inscribed — circulate alongside his prints in the secondary market. His subject matter, while rooted in the specific landscape and culture of East Texas, achieves a universal, allegorical quality that has earned him comparisons to photographers like Sally Mann and Eugene Atget for his ability to find the uncanny within the everyday. His gelatin silver prints — the traditional darkroom photographic process he has continued to favor throughout a career spanning digital photography's rise — are signed, often titled and dated, and are the works most commonly found at auction, alongside his signed monograph photography books.