Jeff Carter (photographer)
Encyclopedia
Jeff Carter was an Australia
n photographer and author.
and attended Melbourne Boys High School. By the time he matriculated in 1946, his three major passions were clear – photography, writing and travel. He began taking photographs while still at high school. His first photos were taken with a Kodak Box Brownie
, given to him as a 13th birthday present.
, People
, Pix, Walkabout
and Australian Women's Weekly
. He was later also commissioned by National Geographic. The curator of the 2011 retrospective of Carter's work, Sandra Byron, said his photographs were "deceptively simple because they were extremely well crafted, wonderful images", and that he was an important figure in Australian documentary photography.
From 1949-54, Carter was editor of Outdoors and Fishing magazine; he then resigned to travel in rural and outback Australia as a freelance photo-journalist. He wrote and illustrated 17 books based on his experiences. His most widely held book outside Australia is People of the Inland. [Adelaide]: Rigby, 1966. OCLC 901968. Carter's other books include: The Life and Land of Central Australia (1967); Outback in Focus (1968); Stout Hearts and Leathery Hands (1968); Surf Beaches of Australia’s East Coast (1968); Four-Wheel Drive Swagman (1969); Wild Country (1974); Jeff Carter's Great Book Of The Australian Outdoors (1976); All Things Wild (1977); and Jeff Carter's Guided Tours Of The Outback (1979).
Carter is quoted as saying that he was influenced by writers such as Upton Sinclair
, John Steinbeck
and Edgar Snow
.
, which was shown internationally, including the annual television festival MIP in Cannes, France. An episode won awards for Best Documentary, Best Director and Best Editing at the 1974 Australian Film Institute Awards
, and an episode won several awards at the annual television festival MIP in Cannes, France.
From 1981–85, he was head teacher of photography at the Wollongong campus of the National Art School.
, The National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia (over 450 photographs), the Art Gallery of South Australia
, the Australian National Museum, and the Powerhouse Museum
. They have been exhibited at the National Library of Australia, the National Art Gallery of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Art Gallery of South Australia and overseas galleries in Osaka, Japan, Lisbon, Portugal, New York and Paris.
The Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne, held a major retrospective exhibition of his images in May-June 2003, which was seen by a record number of over 9,000 visitors. Part of this exhibition was then shown at the Christine Abrahams Gallery, and the National Trust Gallery in Melbourne.
Carter received the Australia Council’s Visual Arts/Craft Board 2004 Emeritus award. Senator Rod Kemp, then Minister for the Arts and Sport, commented:
The National Library compendium of its image collection uses the iconic image Tobacco Road for the cover illustration. A collection of his black and white studies was published as Jeff Carter: Retrospective Sydney: New Holland, 2005, ISBN 9781741102130
Filmmaker Catherine Hunter joined Carter on a road trip in June 2010 to western New South Wales, revisiting bush characters he had first photographed back in the 1950s. The result was a half-hour documentary, Inland Heart: The Photography of Jeff Carter.
Throughout his career, Carter has produced series that show the progression of events over time. Concentrating on rituals and process, they comprise evocative images.
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n photographer and author.
Early life
Carter was born to Percy and Doris Carter in Melbourne in August 1928 in VictoriaVictoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
and attended Melbourne Boys High School. By the time he matriculated in 1946, his three major passions were clear – photography, writing and travel. He began taking photographs while still at high school. His first photos were taken with a Kodak Box Brownie
Brownie (camera)
Brownie is the name of a long-running and extremely popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900, was a very basic cardboard box camera...
, given to him as a 13th birthday present.
Career
In 1946, Carter set off to travel around Australia with his camera and typewriter and made a living selling his stories and photographs to a wide range of Australian and international newspapers and magazines including Paris MatchParis Match
Paris Match is a French weekly magazine. It covers major national and international news along with celebrity lifestyle features. It was founded in 1949 by the industrialist Jean Prouvost....
, People
People (Australian magazine)
People is a weekly Australian lad's mag published by ACP Publishing, a division of PBL Media. It has been published since the 1950s. It is not to be confused with the gossip magazine known by that name in the United States; that magazine is published under the name Who in Australia.People focuses...
, Pix, Walkabout
Walkabout magazine
Walkabout was an Australian illustrated magazine published from 1934 to 1974 combining cultural, geographic, and scientific content with travel literature. Initially a travel magazine, in its forty-year run it featured a popular mix of articles by travellers, officials, residents, journalists, and...
and Australian Women's Weekly
Australian Women's Weekly
The Australian Women's Weekly is an Australian monthly women's magazine published by ACP Magazines, a division of PBL Media based in Sydney. Audited circulation in 2009 exceeded 500,000 copies monthly, making it the largest magazine in Australia.-History:...
. He was later also commissioned by National Geographic. The curator of the 2011 retrospective of Carter's work, Sandra Byron, said his photographs were "deceptively simple because they were extremely well crafted, wonderful images", and that he was an important figure in Australian documentary photography.
From 1949-54, Carter was editor of Outdoors and Fishing magazine; he then resigned to travel in rural and outback Australia as a freelance photo-journalist. He wrote and illustrated 17 books based on his experiences. His most widely held book outside Australia is People of the Inland. [Adelaide]: Rigby, 1966. OCLC 901968. Carter's other books include: The Life and Land of Central Australia (1967); Outback in Focus (1968); Stout Hearts and Leathery Hands (1968); Surf Beaches of Australia’s East Coast (1968); Four-Wheel Drive Swagman (1969); Wild Country (1974); Jeff Carter's Great Book Of The Australian Outdoors (1976); All Things Wild (1977); and Jeff Carter's Guided Tours Of The Outback (1979).
Carter is quoted as saying that he was influenced by writers such as Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
, John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
and Edgar Snow
Edgar Snow
Edgar P. Snow was an American journalist known for his books and articles on Communism in China and the Chinese Communist revolution...
.
Television
From 1972–74, together with his partner Mare, he filmed, wrote and produced the television series Wild Country for the Seven NetworkSeven Network
The Seven Network is an Australian television network owned by Seven West Media Limited. It dates back to 4 November 1956, when the first stations on the VHF7 frequency were established in Melbourne and Sydney.It is currently the second largest network in the country in terms of population reach...
, which was shown internationally, including the annual television festival MIP in Cannes, France. An episode won awards for Best Documentary, Best Director and Best Editing at the 1974 Australian Film Institute Awards
Australian Film Institute Awards
The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award, known as the AACTA Award , is an accolade presented annually by the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts . The awards recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry and television industry, including directors,...
, and an episode won several awards at the annual television festival MIP in Cannes, France.
From 1981–85, he was head teacher of photography at the Wollongong campus of the National Art School.
Collections and exhibitions
His photographs are in the collections of the Art Gallery of NSW, the National Gallery of VictoriaNational Gallery of Victoria
The National Gallery of Victoria is an art gallery and museum in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is the oldest and the largest public art gallery in Australia. Since December 2003, NGV has operated across two sites...
, The National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia (over 450 photographs), the Art Gallery of South Australia
Art Gallery of South Australia
The Art Gallery of South Australia , located on the cultural boulevard of North Terrace in Adelaide, is the premier visual arts museum in the Australian state of South Australia. It has a collection of over 35,000 works of art, making it, after the National Gallery of Victoria, the largest state...
, the Australian National Museum, and the Powerhouse Museum
Powerhouse Museum
The Powerhouse Museum is the major branch of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney, the other being the historic Sydney Observatory...
. They have been exhibited at the National Library of Australia, the National Art Gallery of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Art Gallery of South Australia and overseas galleries in Osaka, Japan, Lisbon, Portugal, New York and Paris.
The Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne, held a major retrospective exhibition of his images in May-June 2003, which was seen by a record number of over 9,000 visitors. Part of this exhibition was then shown at the Christine Abrahams Gallery, and the National Trust Gallery in Melbourne.
Carter received the Australia Council’s Visual Arts/Craft Board 2004 Emeritus award. Senator Rod Kemp, then Minister for the Arts and Sport, commented:
The annual Visual Arts/Craft Emeritus Award and Medal honour the achievements of artists and advocates who have made outstanding and lifelong contributions to the arts in Australia. The career of itinerant, self-taught photographer Jeff Carter spans half a century. It has been estimated that he has produced some 55,000 negatives since he took to the road in 1946 as a young man inspired by his heroes Steinbeck and Hemingway. Armed with a typewriter and a 1A folding Kodak camera, he set about on a journey across the country that would see him document the people, places and life of a changing Australia. In doing so, he has produced one of this country's most remarkable and historically significant photographic archives. As his self-titled calling as photographer to the 'poor and unknown' suggests, Carter is a humanist whose early articles and iconic black and white images, like Tobacco Road and The Drover's Wife, exposed an appreciation of the difficulties Australians outside major cities faced everyday.
The National Library compendium of its image collection uses the iconic image Tobacco Road for the cover illustration. A collection of his black and white studies was published as Jeff Carter: Retrospective Sydney: New Holland, 2005, ISBN 9781741102130
Filmmaker Catherine Hunter joined Carter on a road trip in June 2010 to western New South Wales, revisiting bush characters he had first photographed back in the 1950s. The result was a half-hour documentary, Inland Heart: The Photography of Jeff Carter.
Themes
As a photographer, Carter concentrated on the unglamorous and unprivileged aspects of Australia, with a focus on the working lives and conditions of ordinary Australians. During his early travels, his experiences as an itinerant bush worker, fruit picker, side show "urger" for a travelling boxing troupe, drover, road worker, and mill hand, brought him in contact with the people who would be the subjects of his photographs. These early years of his career filled him with admiration for those making their livings in some of the toughest environments in Australia.Throughout his career, Carter has produced series that show the progression of events over time. Concentrating on rituals and process, they comprise evocative images.
Personal life
In 1947 at the age of 19, Jeff Carter married Frances Oscar, a motorcycle biker in a circus sideshow and had his first child, a daughter, Karen Siobhan Carter, the same year. He had a subsequent child to the same marriage. In 1952 he embarked on a de facto relationship with Mary Thompson-Read-Young (known as 'Mare'). They had two children, Goth and Vandal. He settled in 1962 on a 45-hectare farm at Foxground near the south coast town of Berry, NSW. Although separated from Mary Thompson-Read-Young in 1984, they continued to live together until his death on the 25th October, 2010.Obituary
Jeff Carter's obituary, written by Robert McFarlane, appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on 6 November 2010.Exhibitions of work by Jeff Carter
- Focus Oz, 1991-2 – Berry NSW
- Untitled, 1992 – Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne
- Saturday Arvo, 1993 – Stills Gallery, Sydney
- Untitled, 1994 – Christine Abrahams Gallery
- Concerned Viewer, 1995 – Photographers Gallery, Sydney
- Beach, Bush & Battlers, 1995 – Byron-Mapp Gallery, Sydney
- Battlers,1996 – Christine Abrahams Gallery, 1998 – Byron-Mapp Gallery, 1999 Penrith Regional Gallery, 1999 Brisbane City Art Gallery, 2000 Gippsland Regional Art Gallery, 2002 – Myrtleford, Victoria
- Sydney Images, 1996 – Byron-Mapp Gallery
- A Hungry Eye, 1999 – Dick Bett Gallery, Hobart
- 8 Seconds High!, 1999 – Christine Abrahams Gallery, 2003 – Museum Of The Riverina, Wagga, 2003 - Shear Outback, Hay, NSW,
- Selected Images, 1999 – Paris Photo Show
- The Way We Were, 2000 – Byron-Mapp Gallery
- Combined Artists, 2000 – Byron-Mapp Gallery
- Selected Images, 2000 – Paris Photo Show
- Charles Kerry/Jeff Carter, 2001 - Mosman Art Gallery
- Images 1950-2000, 2001 – Christine Abrahams Gallery
- Federation (Contrib. Artist), 2001 – National Gallery of AustraliaNational Gallery of AustraliaThe National Gallery of Australia is the national art gallery of Australia, holding more than 120,000 works of art. It was established in 1967 by the Australian government as a national public art gallery.- Establishment :...
- Images 1950-2000, 2001 – Byron-Mapp Gallery
- Big River Show (Contrib. Artist), 2002 – Wagga Regional Art Gallery
- Retrospective, 2003 – Monash Gallery of Art, Victoria
- Images 1950-2001 – National Trust Parliament Place Gallery, Melbourne
- Icon Images, 2003 - Christine Abrahams Gallery
- Vintage Images, 2006 - Sandra Byron Gallery, Sydney
- Retrospective Images, 2006 - Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne
- 'La Nieta', 2006 - The Australian Photographers Gallery, Sydney
- Queen Victoria Market Series: 1956, 2008 Queen Victoria Market
- Beach, Bush + Battlers: Photographs by Jeff Carter 2011 – State Library of NSWState Library of New South WalesThe State Library of New South Wales is a large public library owned by the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is located in Macquarie Street, Sydney near Shakespeare Place...
from 4 January - 20 February
External links
- Pictures Collection, National Library of Australia, Canberra: Enter Jeff Carter as search terms
- Jeff Carter's website: http://www.jeffcarterphotos.com