Posts Tagged ‘museums’
Egypt, Mother of of the World
I landed in Beirut in 1964 knowing nothing of the region. I was there to represent a New York photo agency — when such outfits had their people stationed around the world doing photojournalistic assignments.
One of the first people I met was the New York Times’ Middle East bureau chief, Dana Adams Schmidt. A seasoned writer, he was just leaving for Egypt, Yemen, South Arabia and Yemen: did I want to go with him? I jumped at the chance.
In Cairo I accompanied Dana on some of his political interviews. Nasser was in power trumpeting his anti-colonialist, pro-socialist, Arab-nationalist agenda. Since time immemorial the Egyptians, with their proud history, had considered themselves the cultural and political leaders of the Arab community.
The term for this outlook was — and is — Masr, Um al-Dunia: “Egypt, mother of the world.”
I had time to explore the teeming, wonderful streets. The following year I would return to the Nile Delta photographing for a UN agricultural development agency. The country’s problems were deep — seemingly intractable — yet the faces were joyous. I can only hope some of that spirit survives the latest crisis. Half a century seems less long inside a seedbed of civilization.
All photos © William Carter 1965
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Portrait Of…?
Content is in the eye of the beholder
by William Carter
The Holy Karmapa, age seven, at Tsurphu Monastery, Tibet, October, 1992. Eight years later, in 2000, he fled Chinese occupation to join the Dalai Lama in India. Photograph by William Carter 1992
Every picture carries meanings behind the surface — beyond the literal. Our yearning for such meanings makes us human. This enduring, endearing need for meaning appears in many guises.
Photographs carry values. Across much of Europe and the U.S., many of the old churches are empty. But the museums are full. People hunger for something beyond the commercial — even as some monuments of high culture seem to have become palaces of mass entertainment.
Every photograph is a slice through space, and a slice of time. Different slices mean differently to different persons.
The Karmapa, above, is looking at you, even as you are looking at him. What part of you is he looking at? How do you see him? If you are looking at him while he is looking at you, are you in effect looking at yourself?
And what about the shot below, of the Duchess and Duke of Windsor (the abdicated British king), and their driver: what do you — and the onlookers beyond the window — bring to this picture?
Photograph by William Carter 1967
And what, then of pictures of your relatives, or your children? I took the photo below of Jobi, my wife’s grandson, on his 17th birthday. Different people see it differently. I don’t notice the hair, for example; I just see the eyes as spiritual; reminds me of an Italian Renaissance painting.
Jobim Morris Gavrielli, June 30, 2012; photograph by William Carter
In the same way, my published photographs elicit a wide variety of responses. In my recent book, Causes and Spirits, my shot of an older woman carrying a watering can up the steps of her Minnesota bungalow in 1973 elicited an e-mail from a man who speculated on the market value of the house, then and now, 39 years later.
Northern Minnesota, 1973
For decades (actually, centuries) artists in various media have preoccupied themselves with issues of their own identity. Contemporary educators and tastemakers have supported this kind of questioning, often as a critique of modern society. Since the 1970s some have even called it the “culture of complaint.” Sculptures such as this were evidently meant to shock visitors to the Jerusalem’s Israel Museum in 1993:
Photograph by William Carter 1993
My response was to look elsewhere for things closer to my own heart. I found them in a nearby orphanage, and in a refugee camp:
Photograph by William Carter 1993
Photograph by William Carter 1993
In the Middle East, as I mentioned in earlier blogs, perception of identity and reality hinges crucially on tribal affiliation. My self-assignment as a photographer has long been to try to see past such tags, to the underlying humanity. Does this slot me with 19th century romanticism and impressionism, as opposed to modernism or postmodernism or what else is currently hip? Who cares? This image from Hungary in 1964 belies the fact that Russian tanks were parked just over the hill:
Photograph by William Carter 1964
Or this one, in Yemen, at a time when the Egyptians and the Saudis were fighting a proxy war there, with the subtle involvement of the Americans and the Soviets (sound familiar?):
Photograph by William Carter 1964
As a kind of summing up, here’s one from my book, Preservation Hall. It’s of Emanuel Sales singing in New Orleans. One of his fellow jazzmen told me, “You got to have soul, man, to do this work.”
Photograph by William Carter 1991
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Versions of Ourselves
I am as addicted to digits as the next person. But my caring comes from elsewhere.
Culture wars, like other wars, take their toll. Unexpected outcomes flow into our sinews and, welcome or not, affect our feelings and expressions.
I grew up in a town dedicated to change — in an era summed up in the famous motto of a leading corporation, “Progress is our most important product.” Postwar LA, powered by newborn defense industries, famous for its movies, a thinly peopled, dry basin lacking deep cultural roots, facing the vast Pacific, was perfectly placed for the unfettered growth and change that was soon underway.
My own personal model was the opposite. I sought permanent values, humaneness, the depths not the surfaces. Spiritual affirmation — particularly in the arts. So, physically and mentally, I went the other way from LA. The older tradition of great West Coast photographers had inspired me, but by the 1960s I needed to move on from there to places like New York, London, the Middle East and India – where close-up tenderness and long-term values still seemed alive and honored.
In California there were plenty of photographers of the old school to inspire me. But their dynamic was gradually being eclipsed. Although not particularly “outgoing,” I did go out. I developed the unfashionable notion that the role of the artist was not to stand off and snipe at the ugly aspects of world, but to offer a positive alternative: in that most unfashionable of words — beauty. In an era beset by counter-cultural attack modes, I remain a counter-revolutionary.
The two photographs below, by Struth and Cunningham, are well-known offerings of contrasting states of soul. Which would you rather hold close?
Thomas Struth, “String Handling,” SolarWorld, Frieberg 2011
Imogen Cunningham, “The Unmade Bed,” 1957
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Iraqi Kurdistan: More Surprises (Part 3)
Many of us learned in school that Mesopotamia’s Tigris-Euphrates Valley cradled the world’s earliest civilization. Unending waves of conquest would sweep over this well-watered land, obliterating much — but not all — of its history. Recent violence in northern Iraq spotlights once-isolated ethnic groups, such as the Yazidis and the Chaldean Christians; Aramaic-speaking villagers as well as remote members of the Muslim Kadri sect. Some of these far-flung peoples and languages date back thousands of years.
And, archeologists have long suspected there were important artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia still awaiting discovery in caves in Kurdistan. I learned this after a journalistic trek on foot and by donkey through the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan “recently” — only fifty years ago.
Welcomed by the, as yet, little-known Kurdish peshmerga guerrilla fighters, I was doing a photo story on their long-running struggle for autonomy within Iraq and Turkey. At one point my hosts showed me broken, thick stone rock carvings a local sheik had had dragged out of a cave. Evidently he wanted to sell them to me, but I was not in that business. It would have taken an expedition to move them. I took pictures of them, with their hieroglyphic writing. The next year, in London, I showed the photographs to the British Museum. The experts became quite interested, and wanted lots of details, including the exact location, which I was unable to provide other than “oh, we just happen to stop there for tea last June on the march from point A to point B, somewhere north of Sulaimaniya.” Nonetheless the British Museum reproduced my pictures in a scholarly publication.
Given the destruction of the once wonderful Baghdad Museum occasioned by the Bush-era invasion, I sometimes wonder if that stele, and others (?) like it, are not safer staying in their caves. During Saddam Hussein’s ruthless bombings and gassings of isolated ethnic villages — as under the current Isis marauders — some of these thousand-year survivors have themselves reverted to living in caves. Again, I photographed one group all too briefly before hurrying on to rejoin the peshmergas’ march. I always wanted to go back and explore these other ethnicities of Kurdistan, but that was not to be. This year, 2014, the Kurds invited me to fly into Erbil, now a modern city built on oil revenues. We would have loved to, but pushing 80, I hesitated — luckily, just before a new wave of gunmen surrounded the city.
Iraqi Kurdistan 1965 photographs © William Carter
Member of the Muslim Kadri sect celebrates spring ritual near the Iraq-Iran border
Members of Muslim Kadri sect celebrate spring ritual near the Iraq-Iran border
Christians sheltering in a cave from aerial bombing — Iraqi Kurdistan
Christians sheltering in a cave from aerial bombing — Iraqi Kurdistan
Mesopotamian stone carving hidden in cave, Iraqi Kurdistan
Mesopotamian stone carving hidden in cave, Iraqi Kurdistan
Hieroglyphics on stone in cave, Iraqi Kurdistan
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Crossing Party Lines: a Follow-Up
Thanks to all those who responded positively to my last blog, “Crossing Party Lines — Creatively.” Several of you complimented us on our wedding pictures! Which made me realize, to my chagrin, that I had neglected to thank and credit our good photographer-friend, who graciously gave us those lovely prints 28+ years ago: Esme Gibson! The event was in San Marino, California, and was one photo opportunity I couldn’t handle myself.
I regret I have no such light to shed on the current Syrian tragedy. But you can see my earlier blogs on the reported damages to that nation’s ancient monuments and peoples: “Contested Stones Redux” and “Plight of Syria’s Kurds Breaks into the News.”
Plus, here are four more photographs, semi-related to current events in the Middle East.
The first, done on assignment from the US Information Agency, shows the Baghdad Museum, its ancient Mesopotamian treasures still intact, in 1965 — long before the destruction occasioned by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The second photograph is of unemployed men in Aleppo, Syria in 1993.
The third is from Gaza in 1993.
The fourth is in an orphanage in Jerusalem, 1993.
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Carters in SF MOMA Show
Photograph by Chuck Frankel. Viewing Carter prints at SFMOMA: this museum was among the first in the world to collect photographs as a fine art.
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.”
San Francisco 1969
Central City, Colorado 1970
Geneseo, Illinois 1973
Fuengirola, Spain 1968
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
By William Carter 