"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show in this video I want to take a look at an early body of work from one of my favorite photographers Keith Carter and this is one of his first books it's called from uncertain to Blue which documents a series of trips that he made in the 1980s across Texas to some oddly named Texas towns and I think this is a really important body of work to look at um if you're into Keith Carter and one being that he's from Texas and two being that this is a far cry from the where his style is evolved to today and what you see in his work today is an amalgamation of a lot of things but I think that's one of the things that impresses me the most about Keith Carter is that he is one of those photographers who continues to improve and evolve over the years he doesn't stick with one particular thing or aesthetic or style and just work that out um he lets every body of work influence the next and this is a particularly early set of images from him and what I find interesting about this is you start to see some of the traits that ended up later affecting his work I think in a big way so probably the best thing we should do right now is go look at some images so we're looking at from uncertain to Blue which as I mentioned earlier is one of Keith's earliest monographs and the title of the book comes from the state of Texas and as Keith very poetically states in the intro here Texas is king-sized and Majestic and as somebody from Texas I really think there's a lot of Beauty in that statement Texas is vast it is huge you can drive an entire day and never leave the state and it's very Mystic as well and one of the things that is particularly interesting if you've ever looked at a map of Texas is Texas is populated by all these little tiny towns with really funny names so the title of the book from uncertain to Blue those are two of the Texas towns that are represented in this book Uncertain Texas and blue Texas there's also Ponder there's art there's poetry they have very quirky names and most of these towns it's like you can blow through them and not even realize that you went through a town they're very small and so this is an interesting concept behind this book so Keith and his wife Pat Uh were thinking about taking a vacation and they had looked into all these exotic trips going to Europe and things like that nothing was really speaking to them and they were talking about the funny name Texas towns they pulled out a map and had been marking them on there and decided to embark on what ultimately became a series of road trips to visit these towns and Keith began to photograph them and this span several years I think some of these trips started in the mid 80s so as early as 1984 some of these images but I think officially from 1986 to about 1988 is when the bulk of this work was done and what I think is very interesting about that as well is when you start going through through these images is there is you know the 8S are kind of remembered as having a specific aesthetic to them and this was really anti 1980s aesthetic a lot of these images and it's also interesting to see the thought process that went down Behind These and I want to talk about the way the book is laid out you have a lot of contact sheets in here which I think is particularly significant and I've mentioned over and over on this show that that's one of my favorite things when you have an artist that's willing to share their contact sheets because what you're seeing is the thought process um these were made with the sleeves on so they they are marked with the final image but you can see kind of what some of the variations were and in the case of Keith Carter here he definitely had a deliberate image in mind and he would pretty much shoot a roll of film around that and one of the things he also States in this book is that he purposely did not want to overshoot and overd doent it wanted just one image to represent the place and I think that that's kind of it's important because there's kind of a minimal quality to that and he also mentions in here that you know when he started going on the trips that he didn't shoot at all and it's interesting because when you're in the state of Texas depending on where you are there's a lot of different landscapes in Texas but you don't have any mountains so for the most part except for West Texas but you don't have the rolling anel Adams Landscapes and so you know Keith mentioned that it was really challenging and what he felt like he was doing early on was just shooting nothing and soon as they began to get comfortable traveling nothing started to turn into something and there's a lot of portraits in these books uh usually he would ask people to go grab their favorite thing that they'd like to be photographed with so a lot of times you see a prop or something in some of the images U the other thing I love about this book are some of the spreads and this is a real simple one but but very elegant and beautiful and so on the left spread you have poetry and on the right you have art so they're connected by name but also the geometry and the justos between the two and the contrast I think is really quite beautiful I want to talk just a little bit about this early aesthetic that we see in Keith Carter's work and one of the things he talks about in here is that he was particularly drawn to and interested in looking for light and so one of the things I love about this and this represents Blossom Texas but what we see here is a farmer and he's in kind of a minimally decorated room with a table on the back and this pin board with a few things pinned to it but really the light source that we're seeing here is on uh the right side of the image here and has that's just kind of coming in this beautiful diffused Manner and what we're seeing here is almost a nod back to pmas types of Works uh vermier um you think of early painters and I think that that permeates Keith's work and that's a staple that you still see come through today uh Keith's one who works a lot with natural light and I think that's really important particularly when if you consider these were taken in the mid 80s and you know aesthetic was different back then and you know things were a little bit over the top sometimes a little too glossy um this is a great image here I'm trying to kill the glare for you this is uh BB Texas and as the story goes with this image uh he walked into this shop and literally this woman had everything you could buy groceries Hardware you name it he said the place was kind of a mess and everything was covered with dust but purly everything except This Woman's perfectly done hair and he said she was a bit of a character and she asked that he photograph her with her as she said famous bottle collection this is something that is very small town Texas and very cool and you can see from the uh from the contact sheet that he did make a couple images of her bottle collection as well but but really cute photo and and again a little bit Whimsical but but very Texas in nature um another image I want to share with you is this one which I really like too which is basically just again another slice of Life type portrait and one of the this is in mayel one of the things that Keith mentions in here is that he was particularly drawn to this gentleman's shoes uh the shoes are great and so is the the white wheel on the tire here and he said he was particularly drawn to that uh he said he was shooting away and once this gentleman realized that he was shooting his shoes he started to hike up his pants which is kind of funny too because uh when you look at the context sheet which is on the previous page um the order the shooting order goes from top to bottom in rows like this and you can see that you know I think the thought process is always interesting Behind These two the fourth image was chosen it's the one that has the line around it and what you're going to start to see here as he moves along is just Keith with subtle I I think he had that shot in mind but just shot some variations to be sure so moving the guy a little bit to the left centering him up and as you can see he does start to hike up his pants later and then another shot was was done as well so anyway really really cool stuff but to see that thought process behind I think is really important when you're studying work and it's not always possible to see but um when it is there it's it's it's it's amazing um finally I want to end with two images here that I think are particularly important uh in terms of where Keith style ultimately moved towards and this was shot in Oatmeal Texas and the story that he tells on this is that he walked into this little theater and this is what greeted him and he said he had a moral dilemma cuz he wanted to steal that painted backdrop um but he said he wondered what happened to it today but this is an me texes and I love this there's no humans in this scene but there's a couple trademarks in here that I think uh are carried through to Keith's later work and one of them is the Whimsical nature of kind of this play with what is real and what is not real and I think we see that certainly with the painted curtain in the backdrop uh ju poos against the wooden seats the other thing I think is interesting is this light bulb and Keith starts to work a lot with elements um like Globes or spheres or light sources later on and the way that that's isolated compositionally it's almost just a little bit of a premonition I think to some of his more recent work that he's done uh definitely a later period of his work when he started becoming very known the other image that I think uh is really key to that too which I think is just such a beautiful picture of these kids tumbling around in front of this house this is in Uncertain Texas it's one of the first images in the book and this is what's interesting is is Keith does a lot of play with focus and he does a lot of stuff with intentionally throwing out tilt shift um and he does a lot with motion blur uh where the camera stays still and it's a longer exposure and that's what we're starting to see here even in an early body of work like this with these kids that are tumbling through the middle anyway amazing body of work and uh that is from uncertain to Blue if you are interested in building a website or an online portfolio of your own work you might consider checking out our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com squarespace.com is an all-in-one solution for building absolutely beautiful websites you start with a template and you customize that to get exactly the colors and the type faces and the layout that you want to use to best represent your own work Squarespace has an amazing backend that comes with the service that is all drag and drop so literally if you can drag a folder of images drop them on your web browser upload them and then click and drag to sort them around you can build a website and Squarespace are pretty amazing head over to squarespace.com right now to start your free trial they don't even require a credit card you just go sign up and if you're interested in subscribing to their service I can save you an additional 10% off your order at out what you want to do is use offer code aop once again that is squarespace.com and I want to give a special shout out and thanks to Squarespace for once again sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography so that is from uncertain to Blue and I will put a link to this in the show notes if you're interested in finding a copy of this it's well worth owning especially if you're into Keith Carter and it's very different from the work he's doing now but I think it's a key component in kind of a lynchpin in some ways to some of the stylistic elements that he's continued to evolve with over the years um you you know obviously being from Texas um I have a certain fondness for a lot of this work and for Keith as well and so uh anyway I will link that up in the show notes and uh if you guys want to check that out please do it is quite recommended anyway once again guys if you've enjoyed this episode please remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest videos we do here until the next video I'll see you laterwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show in this video I want to take a look at an early body of work from one of my favorite photographers Keith Carter and this is one of his first books it's called from uncertain to Blue which documents a series of trips that he made in the 1980s across Texas to some oddly named Texas towns and I think this is a really important body of work to look at um if you're into Keith Carter and one being that he's from Texas and two being that this is a far cry from the where his style is evolved to today and what you see in his work today is an amalgamation of a lot of things but I think that's one of the things that impresses me the most about Keith Carter is that he is one of those photographers who continues to improve and evolve over the years he doesn't stick with one particular thing or aesthetic or style and just work that out um he lets every body of work influence the next and this is a particularly early set of images from him and what I find interesting about this is you start to see some of the traits that ended up later affecting his work I think in a big way so probably the best thing we should do right now is go look at some images so we're looking at from uncertain to Blue which as I mentioned earlier is one of Keith's earliest monographs and the title of the book comes from the state of Texas and as Keith very poetically states in the intro here Texas is king-sized and Majestic and as somebody from Texas I really think there's a lot of Beauty in that statement Texas is vast it is huge you can drive an entire day and never leave the state and it's very Mystic as well and one of the things that is particularly interesting if you've ever looked at a map of Texas is Texas is populated by all these little tiny towns with really funny names so the title of the book from uncertain to Blue those are two of the Texas towns that are represented in this book Uncertain Texas and blue Texas there's also Ponder there's art there's poetry they have very quirky names and most of these towns it's like you can blow through them and not even realize that you went through a town they're very small and so this is an interesting concept behind this book so Keith and his wife Pat Uh were thinking about taking a vacation and they had looked into all these exotic trips going to Europe and things like that nothing was really speaking to them and they were talking about the funny name Texas towns they pulled out a map and had been marking them on there and decided to embark on what ultimately became a series of road trips to visit these towns and Keith began to photograph them and this span several years I think some of these trips started in the mid 80s so as early as 1984 some of these images but I think officially from 1986 to about 1988 is when the bulk of this work was done and what I think is very interesting about that as well is when you start going through through these images is there is you know the 8S are kind of remembered as having a specific aesthetic to them and this was really anti 1980s aesthetic a lot of these images and it's also interesting to see the thought process that went down Behind These and I want to talk about the way the book is laid out you have a lot of contact sheets in here which I think is particularly significant and I've mentioned over and over on this show that that's one of my favorite things when you have an artist that's willing to share their contact sheets because what you're seeing is the thought process um these were made with the sleeves on so they they are marked with the final image but you can see kind of what some of the variations were and in the case of Keith Carter here he definitely had a deliberate image in mind and he would pretty much shoot a roll of film around that and one of the things he also States in this book is that he purposely did not want to overshoot and overd doent it wanted just one image to represent the place and I think that that's kind of it's important because there's kind of a minimal quality to that and he also mentions in here that you know when he started going on the trips that he didn't shoot at all and it's interesting because when you're in the state of Texas depending on where you are there's a lot of different landscapes in Texas but you don't have any mountains so for the most part except for West Texas but you don't have the rolling anel Adams Landscapes and so you know Keith mentioned that it was really challenging and what he felt like he was doing early on was just shooting nothing and soon as they began to get comfortable traveling nothing started to turn into something and there's a lot of portraits in these books uh usually he would ask people to go grab their favorite thing that they'd like to be photographed with so a lot of times you see a prop or something in some of the images U the other thing I love about this book are some of the spreads and this is a real simple one but but very elegant and beautiful and so on the left spread you have poetry and on the right you have art so they're connected by name but also the geometry and the justos between the two and the contrast I think is really quite beautiful I want to talk just a little bit about this early aesthetic that we see in Keith Carter's work and one of the things he talks about in here is that he was particularly drawn to and interested in looking for light and so one of the things I love about this and this represents Blossom Texas but what we see here is a farmer and he's in kind of a minimally decorated room with a table on the back and this pin board with a few things pinned to it but really the light source that we're seeing here is on uh the right side of the image here and has that's just kind of coming in this beautiful diffused Manner and what we're seeing here is almost a nod back to pmas types of Works uh vermier um you think of early painters and I think that that permeates Keith's work and that's a staple that you still see come through today uh Keith's one who works a lot with natural light and I think that's really important particularly when if you consider these were taken in the mid 80s and you know aesthetic was different back then and you know things were a little bit over the top sometimes a little too glossy um this is a great image here I'm trying to kill the glare for you this is uh BB Texas and as the story goes with this image uh he walked into this shop and literally this woman had everything you could buy groceries Hardware you name it he said the place was kind of a mess and everything was covered with dust but purly everything except This Woman's perfectly done hair and he said she was a bit of a character and she asked that he photograph her with her as she said famous bottle collection this is something that is very small town Texas and very cool and you can see from the uh from the contact sheet that he did make a couple images of her bottle collection as well but but really cute photo and and again a little bit Whimsical but but very Texas in nature um another image I want to share with you is this one which I really like too which is basically just again another slice of Life type portrait and one of the this is in mayel one of the things that Keith mentions in here is that he was particularly drawn to this gentleman's shoes uh the shoes are great and so is the the white wheel on the tire here and he said he was particularly drawn to that uh he said he was shooting away and once this gentleman realized that he was shooting his shoes he started to hike up his pants which is kind of funny too because uh when you look at the context sheet which is on the previous page um the order the shooting order goes from top to bottom in rows like this and you can see that you know I think the thought process is always interesting Behind These two the fourth image was chosen it's the one that has the line around it and what you're going to start to see here as he moves along is just Keith with subtle I I think he had that shot in mind but just shot some variations to be sure so moving the guy a little bit to the left centering him up and as you can see he does start to hike up his pants later and then another shot was was done as well so anyway really really cool stuff but to see that thought process behind I think is really important when you're studying work and it's not always possible to see but um when it is there it's it's it's it's amazing um finally I want to end with two images here that I think are particularly important uh in terms of where Keith style ultimately moved towards and this was shot in Oatmeal Texas and the story that he tells on this is that he walked into this little theater and this is what greeted him and he said he had a moral dilemma cuz he wanted to steal that painted backdrop um but he said he wondered what happened to it today but this is an me texes and I love this there's no humans in this scene but there's a couple trademarks in here that I think uh are carried through to Keith's later work and one of them is the Whimsical nature of kind of this play with what is real and what is not real and I think we see that certainly with the painted curtain in the backdrop uh ju poos against the wooden seats the other thing I think is interesting is this light bulb and Keith starts to work a lot with elements um like Globes or spheres or light sources later on and the way that that's isolated compositionally it's almost just a little bit of a premonition I think to some of his more recent work that he's done uh definitely a later period of his work when he started becoming very known the other image that I think uh is really key to that too which I think is just such a beautiful picture of these kids tumbling around in front of this house this is in Uncertain Texas it's one of the first images in the book and this is what's interesting is is Keith does a lot of play with focus and he does a lot of stuff with intentionally throwing out tilt shift um and he does a lot with motion blur uh where the camera stays still and it's a longer exposure and that's what we're starting to see here even in an early body of work like this with these kids that are tumbling through the middle anyway amazing body of work and uh that is from uncertain to Blue if you are interested in building a website or an online portfolio of your own work you might consider checking out our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com squarespace.com is an all-in-one solution for building absolutely beautiful websites you start with a template and you customize that to get exactly the colors and the type faces and the layout that you want to use to best represent your own work Squarespace has an amazing backend that comes with the service that is all drag and drop so literally if you can drag a folder of images drop them on your web browser upload them and then click and drag to sort them around you can build a website and Squarespace are pretty amazing head over to squarespace.com right now to start your free trial they don't even require a credit card you just go sign up and if you're interested in subscribing to their service I can save you an additional 10% off your order at out what you want to do is use offer code aop once again that is squarespace.com and I want to give a special shout out and thanks to Squarespace for once again sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography so that is from uncertain to Blue and I will put a link to this in the show notes if you're interested in finding a copy of this it's well worth owning especially if you're into Keith Carter and it's very different from the work he's doing now but I think it's a key component in kind of a lynchpin in some ways to some of the stylistic elements that he's continued to evolve with over the years um you you know obviously being from Texas um I have a certain fondness for a lot of this work and for Keith as well and so uh anyway I will link that up in the show notes and uh if you guys want to check that out please do it is quite recommended anyway once again guys if you've enjoyed this episode please remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest videos we do here until the next video I'll see you later\n"