A collection of otherworldly photographs of Southern wetlands featuring an original ghost story.
Southern wetlands, with their moss-draped trees and dark water obscuring mysteries below, are eerily beautiful places, home to ghost stories and haunting, ethereal light. The newest collection from award-winning photographer Keith Carter, Ghostlight captures the otherwordly spirits of swamps, marshes, bogs, baygalls, bayous, and fens in more than a hundred photographs.
From Ossabaw Island, Georgia, to his home ground of East Texas, Carter seeks “the secretive and mysterious” of this often-overlooked landscape: wisps of fog drifting between tree branches; faceless figures contemplating a bog; owls staring directly at the camera lens; infinite paths leading to unknown parts. Similarly, spectral images are evoked in the original short story that opens this book. Ghostlight, writes best-selling author Bret Anthony Johnston, “hovers, darts, disappears. It can be as mean as a cottonmouth, as mischievous aes a child. The closer you get, the farther the light recedes.” A masterpiece of “Bayou Gothic,” Ghostlight challenges our perceptions and invites us to experience the beauty of this elusive world.
A stunning new book...[Ghostlight] conveys the strange allure of these brackish backwaters and their biological menagerie...Carter’s playful approach can be seen in nearly every photograph. Drawing from a deep bag of tricks, he can make photographs that resemble still-life paintings, chiaroscuro portraits, or carefully etched Japanese woodblock prints. His sepia-toned images have a timeless quality emphasized by their vignetting—an old-fashioned darkroom technique that subtly darkens the edges of a print.
Writer Bret Anthony Johnston sets the murky, mysterious tone in Ghostlight with a gothic short story that offers a haunting intonation to Keith Carter’s otherworldly wet-plate B&W photographs. Whispering, humid southern wetlands of moss-draped cypress trees and dark waters breathe spectral light, divulging ghostly apparitions and the gators, owls and other wild things secreted within. Carter’s caressing imagery is a stunning, atmospheric impression of southern mythology.
Keith Carter’s monochromatic masterpiece Ghostlight uses stark contrasts to convey profound emotional depth. The interplay of light and shadow within its frames serves as a silent poetry, inviting readers to immerse themselves in the quiet narratives embedded in each photograph.
[Carter's] photography shares his artistic vision in a artsy, folksy way that connects us all and makes us appreciate what we have here [in Texas].
Keith Carter teaches photography at Lamar University, where he is a Regents Professor and holds the Endowed Walles Chair of Visual and Performing Arts. He is the author of twelve previous books, including several with UT Press: From Uncertain to Blue, Ezekiel's Horse, Fireflies and a retrospective, Keith Carter: Fifty Years.
Bret Anthony Johnston is the internationally best-selling author of Remember Me Like This and Corpus Christi: Stories. He is the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.
