Causes and Spirits: Photographs from Five Decades - Hardcover

William Carter's fifth book is his most comprehensive, most searching -- most personal.The subject is humanity.Causes and Spirits spans a career of fifty years (and counting). Whether Carter was covering the Iraqi Kurds for LIFE, the streets of London for Women's Wear Daily, premature babies for the Stanford University Hospital, the historic American West for book projects, or classic nudes for gallery and museum exhibitions, his most deeply seen images all have an "extra something." Many are published here for the first time.This book's autobiographical text extends the careful compositions by enhancing the subtle connective tissue between the surfaces exposed by the photographer's sensitive eye.A 2007 J. Paul Getty Museum wall caption describing a Carter print can be abbreviated to describe this wider spectrum of his work: "Carter enjoyed a successful career as a photojournalist before turning to the nude. An artist of sensitivity and deep understanding, he creates pictures that communicate natural beauty and spirituality...an awareness of an awe-inspiring locus where life begins that gives the pictures their symbolic weight."Incorporating the author's pictures of people world-wide, Causes and Spirits is a rotunda of bright windows on the human soul. Born in Los Angeles in 1934, William Carter majored in the Humanities Honors Program at Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1957. Moving to Berkeley, he became engrossed in photography and subsequently became a professional photographer, writer, and editor.Carter moved to New York in 1962, where he worked as an editor at the book publisher Harper & Row, and as a freelance photographer. From 1964 to 1966 he lived in Beirut, Lebanon, handling photojournalistic assignments for New York agencies.Based in London from 1966 to 1969, Carter continued to freelance for a variety of worldwide clients. He returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969 for a two-year project: roaming the back roads of the Far West to produce Ghost Towns of the West, a bestselling Sunset pictorial book.He followed this with a volume on America's prairie heartland, Middle West Country (Houghton Mifflin, 1975), and with Preservation Hall (W.W. Norton, 1991), detailing Carter's long, passionate association with the music and musicians of New Orleans. A clarinetist, he appears on a dozen traditional jazz albums.By 1990 Carter's photography was moving from the printed page to gallery walls. This fulfillment of long-held personal values inspired a fifteen-year project photographing the nude, resulting in the publication of his Illuminations (1996).Continuing to travel and photograph, and to revisit his earlier work with new eyes, William Carter lives near San Francisco with his wife Ulla Morris-Carter. 

"use another eye"Rumi