Keith Carter

What a freakin cool ass dude. I never thought I would see him right in front of me. 

For those of you who don't know anything about him, he's a self taught photographer from a small town in Texas. His mom was a photographer in the 50's, and he said he never paid attention as a kid, but that his mom would always turn their kitchen into a darkroom at night and print photographs to sell to the neighbors and locals around the area.

You can check out some of his work......here.

And thats not even the half of it! In a lot of his work he likes to create fantasy throughout his photographs, but also like nature and animals a lot too. I didn't know this but he did a lot of commercial work also and some bands have his photographs as their cd labels, and authors have them on their books, and that the Gap called him up once and asked him to make a photograph for their shoes. He showed us that photograph and he placed their shoes in the mouth of an alligator and sent it to them and got a call back saying, "this isn't what we're looking for." I just thought was hilarious. He also told us a story about how he got a call from the band The Hives one day wanting one of his photographs for their cd label. The photograph was of a man carrying his girlfriend on his back in a lake. (I've looked for this photograph online and can't seem to find it anywhere) They asked him if he had a release for the people in the photograph and he told them, "Well, no. I was walking around and saw this couple and just thought they were beautiful and just said... 'Stop' and made this photograph." He said, "Now this is the first thing they teach you at Columbia....never forget a release! But....I'm a dumbass," and he laughed. 

Throughout his lecture he gave a lot of great advice. He told us The 5 things to keep creativity:

1. We all need to work of others.

2. Make friends with uncertainty.

3. It's all about making choices.

4. Belong to a place, belong to something.

5. The full weight and mystery of your art rests upon the relationship between you and your subject.

He spoke a lot about what each of these means, and he even added, "You don't always need weed to be creative." 

He even showed us a sneak peak on what he was currently working on. He's doing a series of photographs of women with ridiculously long hair, (which let me tell you is incredible). Some of these women he found have hair as long as them!

He concluded with his lecture by saying, 

"Don't ever think you can't make a difference. Don't ever be afraid someone is going to "copy" you or think you're crazy, just do it. Take a secound to look around you, look in your backyard, your block, your street, it all starts there."