Keith Carter Quotes

#1. I don't know if I can articulate how I feel. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would make it here.

Keith Carter

#2. How do you find a way to say what an extraordinary experience it is to be alive in this world? That is the kind of subject matter I try to work with.

Keith Carter

#3. The full weight and mystery of your art rests upon your relationship to your subject matter.

Keith Carter

#4. The raw materials of photography are light and time and memory.

Keith Carter

#5. I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.

Keith Carter

#6. I don't think science is necessarily incompatible with mystical or spiritual sensibilities. I often weigh them equally in my thinking, which sometimes finds itself into the work.

Keith Carter

#7. Poetry at least in my own life, is really about your own mortality. Everything in poetry makes me think of my mortality. It is not a dark thing in life; it prepares you for the graceful things that happen in your life. It gives me a license to make any kind of picture I want with great courage.

Keith Carter

#8. When I started using the extreme short depth of field and single point of focus, I was trying to replicate my changing eyesight. We have binocular vision; one eye perceives space from the other. I don't experience a scene visually at F32. It's more like F1.4.

Keith Carter

#9. I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments.

Keith Carter

#10. I love the history of photography and one process has always replaced another. However, very, very few have disappeared.

Keith Carter

#11. Your ideas come out of the way you conduct your life.

Keith Carter

#12. I'm fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture.

Keith Carter

#13. I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

Keith Carter

#14. Sharpness is overrated.

Keith Carter

#15. At a fundamental level photography is much like pointing, and all of us occasionally point at things: look at that, look at that sailboat, look at that tree, etc. etc.

Keith Carter

#16. Making these photographs has often seemed to me like a kind of dance. Often I have danced badly and the world has fallen apart at my feet. But sometimes the dance has gone well and my subject and I have moved together as if with shared purpose.

Keith Carter

#17. I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they're natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there's more than meets the eye.

Keith Carter

#18. You are lucky if you have one or two epiphanies in your life, particularly a creative one.

Keith Carter

#19. I want to be made better personally. That is the gig.

Keith Carter