JACOB CARTER
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
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C.V.
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PUBLICATIONS
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WORKS
1940 Landscape
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Coast of Britain
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Wilderness
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
Back to the Future
In his work Jacob Carter shows us the qualities of an English dandy. The aestheticism of the 19th century comes through as Carter coerces a beauty from obsolete film footage that appears more like images from the early days of photography than those of modern processes. As a template for his aesthetic, Carter prefers colored fin-de-siècle postcards. After extensive elaboration with gum arabic and salts to find his way toward excellent landscape images, in the end Carter has entrusted his work to digital imaging, but his attitude toward progress remains critical:
"All technologies and inventions have written within their lifespan the certainty of being rendered obsolete by improvement. Technology is in a state of unceasing change... A catalogue of photographic processes and techniques now cast aside by progress stands testament to this."
One of Carter's series refers explicitly to the 1940s. In this recent past the triumph of color photography began. In this, Carter is interested in the primitive. With his art he tries to return to "innocence" by attempting a synthesis of certain colors, structures and tonal values that were so significant for this era.
But what has happened in the meantime? What do his contemporary images tell of the British coast, the banks of the Thames or from the Canadian wilderness? Man took possession of the landscape, altered them through industry and tourism, made its luminosity fade. Jacob Carter rediscovered the colors in his crate of tricks of photographic techniques. That is what makes him a dandy, an aesthete – why should he care about modernity, when there is beauty to invent?
Horst Klöver
