He has exhibited in galleries around the world, but finding a home in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., is an honor that holds a special place in Lamar art professor Keith Carter’s heart.
Carter earned this distinction when the gallery recently acquired three of his photographs of playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote. A native of Wharton, Texas, Foote won Academy Awards for the screenplay of “Tender Mercies” and the adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the big screen. He also received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay “The Trip to Bountiful.”
Foote’s other honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play “The Young Man From Atlanta” and in 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts.
“Horton is a national treasure,” says Carter. “He’s a wonderful guy, a sweet, civilized, intelligent man.”
The two have been friends since 1987, when Foote wrote the introduction for Carter’s first book of photographs, “From Uncertain to Blue.”
In addition to the National Portrait Gallery, Carter’s photographs may soon have another important home in Washington: the White House. Carter recently learned that President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle are fans of his work and display at least one of his prints in their home in Chicago.
“It’s an amazing story,” Carter says. “Someone in Colorado sent me a copy of the ‘Time-Life’ book, ‘The American Journey of Barack Obama,’ with a note to ‘see page 96.’ I turned to that page and found a picture of Mr. Obama and his wife at their home in Chicago. A print of one of my pictures is hanging on the wall over their bookcase.”
The photograph of an African-American woman standing in a cotton field is imbued with deep meaning. Carter took the picture, titled “Garlic,” as part of a series made possible through the Lange-Taylor Prize from Duke University. He received the grant for his proposal to document the poorest county in the United States, which at that time, was Tunica, Mississippi.
“The picture is a social commentary on poverty and race in America,” he says of “Garlic,” which has long been one of his personal favorites. “The woman in the photo had just yanked stalks of garlic from a subsistence garden she maintained when I took the picture. It speaks volumes about our new president that this type of documentary portrait is the art his family displays in their home.”
Carter is an internationally recognized photographer and educator. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Regional Survey Grants and was the subject of an arts profile on the CBS program Sunday Morning in 1997. A year later, he received Lamar’s highest teaching honor, the University Professor Award, and was named the Lamar University Distinguished Lecturer.
To learn more about the Department of Art at Lamar University, please visit http://dept.lamar.edu/cofac/deptart.
