Holding Venus
by Keith CarterArena Editions, 152 pp., $65
Much of the world’s true beauty escapes us. We simply don’t look hard enough to see it. Most of the time, we’re too busy seeing past things, scanning our surroundings for that which looks flashy or new or different, perpetually moving on to the next thing, so that much of the world is just a blur. On those rare occasions when we slow our eyes enough to actually catch a glimpse of beauty, it tends to surprise us — an unexpected vision of clarity in sharp relief to the blurry world around it, its detail achingly clear, breathtaking in its communication of life’s grace and mystery.
Holding Venus, the latest collection of images from Texas photographer Keith Carter, presents a scrapbook of moments in which true beauty has been suddenly, wondrously glimpsed. In 70 black-and-white plates, Carter captures epiphanies of beauty in European cityscapes, luxuriant floral bouquets, twisted limbs of trees, enigmatic, grave-faced children, and astonishingly serene animals. The photographs are vintage Carter in their stunning play of light and shadow — great pools of velvety blacks, undulating seas of slate and silver, blinding pinpoints of white — and in the way they suggest a spiritual, near mystical quality in their subjects. But they are imbued with a sense of discovery by Carter’s use of a split-focus technique in which bellows attached between the lens and camera body tilt the lens and create a blurry effect in parts of the image that would ordinarily be in focus. In an image such as Pinocchio, showing a street performer manipulating a plain wooden marionette of the title, the marionette, the small case in which he’s carried, and the legs of the puppeteer are in sharp focus near the bottom of the frame, but the rest of the scene — the hedge-lined path, the trees above, the rest of the puppeteer — are fuzzy blocks of black and gray and blobs of white.
At times, this technique can be unnerving, the blurriness too reminiscent of glaucoma or other oracular ailments. But the longer you look, the more the images take on the delicate elegance of watercolor, Carter’s masterful command of darks and light giving the unfocused areas a rich fluidity. And of course, the blurred areas provide a more dramatic contrast to the photographs’ focal points, infusing the sharply etched subjects — the swirl of inky water in a Venetian canal, a burnished trumpet in a plush highbacked chair, the back of an owl perched on a tent post, the seemingly wise eyes of a large dog, a cathedral spire, a young boy wearing a mask of chicken wire across his face, the glint of light off a raven’s beak — with an enchanted sense of import, of grandeur, of mystery, of beauty.
Holding Venus takes its name from one of the photographs in the book, a sly optical illusion in which a figure in a broad-brimmed cowboy hat with an arm raised to the sky appears to be holding the intensely bright planet in his cupped hand. In his erudite, frequently lyrical essay on Carter that follows the plates, critic John Wood offers that the collection builds on the photographer’s previous use of astronomical imagery and that here Carter “has brought heaven and earth together — so close that a person can simply reach out and hold Venus.” Another meaning suggests itself, one linked to another Venus, the Roman goddess of beauty. In these photographs, it is as if Carter has caught some of those rare glimpses of the world’s true beauty and is giving us, at long last, the chance to linger on them and embrace, visually at least, the grace and mystery that goddess represents. In American Beauty, an impossibly elegant floating bag was a reminder of the remarkable splendor that surrounds us everwhere. Holding Venus reminds us of that again, and Carter’s book is its own American beauty.
This article appears in August 11 • 2000.