Jeff Carter, Australian photographer and author.died he was , 82

Jeff Carter  was an Australian photographer and author died he was , 82.

(August 1928 – 25 October 2010)

Early life

Carter was born in August 1928 in Victoria and attended Melbourne Boys’ School. He began taking photographs while still at high school. His first photos were taken with a [Box Brownie], given to him as a 13th birthday present.^[1]

Career

In 1946, Carter set off to travel around Australia with his camera and typewriter and made a living selling his stories and photographs to a wide range of Australian and international newspapers and magazines including Paris Match, People, Pix, Walkabout and Australian Women's Weekly. He was later also commissioned by National Geographic.
From 1949-54, Carter was editor of Outdoors and Fishing magazine; he then resigned to travel in rural and outback Australia as a freelance photo-journalist. He wrote and illustrated 17 books based on his experiences.^[2] His most widely held book outside Australia is People of the Inland. [Adelaide]: Rigby, 1966. OCLC 901968. Carter's other books include: The Life and Land of Central Australia (1967); Outback in Focus (1968); Stout Hearts and Leathery Hands (1968); Surf Beaches of Australia’s East Coast (1968); Four-Wheel Drive Swagman (1969); Wild Country (1974); Jeff Carter's Great Book Of The Australian Outdoors (1976); All Things Wild (1977); and Jeff Carter's Guided Tours Of The Outback (1979).
Carter is quoted as saying that he was influenced by writers such as Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck and Edgar Snow.^[3]

Television

From 1972–74, together with his wife Mare Carter and eldest son Thor Carter, he filmed, wrote and produced the television series Wild Country for the Seven Network, which was shown internationally, including the annual television festival MIP in Cannes, France. An episode won awards for Best Documentary, Best Director and Best Editing at the 1974 Australian Film Institute Awards, and an episode won several awards at the annual television festival MIP in Cannes, France.
From 1981–85, he was head teacher of photography at the Wollongong campus of the National Art School.

Collections and exhibitions

His photographs are in the collections of the Art Gallery of NSW, the National Gallery of Victoria, The National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia (over 450 photographs), the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Australian National Museum, and the Powerhouse Museum. They have been exhibited at the National Library of Australia, the National Art Gallery of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Art Gallery of South Australia and overseas galleries in Osaka, Japan, Lisbon, Portugal, New York and Paris.
The Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne, held a major retrospective exhibition of his images in May-June 2003, which was seen by a record number of over 9,000 visitors. Part of this exhibition was then shown at the Christine Abrahams Gallery, and the National Trust Gallery in Melbourne.
Carter received the Australia Council’s Visual Arts/Craft Board 2004 Emeritus award. Senator Rod Kemp, then Minister for the Arts and Sport, commented:

The annual Visual Arts/Craft Emeritus Award and Medal honour the achievements of artists and advocates who have made outstanding and lifelong contributions to the arts in Australia. The career of itinerant, self-taught photographer Jeff Carter spans half a century. It has been estimated that he has produced some 55,000 negatives since he took to the road in 1946 as a young man inspired by his heroes Steinbeck and Hemingway. Armed with a typewriter and a 1A folding Kodak camera, he set about on a journey across the country that would see him document the people, places and life of a changing Australia. In doing so, he has produced one of this country's most remarkable and historically significant photographic archives. As his self-titled calling as photographer to the 'poor and unknown' suggests, Carter is a humanist whose early articles and iconic black and white images, like Tobacco Road and The Drover's Wife, exposed an appreciation of the difficulties Australians outside major cities faced everyday.

The National Library compendium of its image collection uses the iconic image Tobacco Road for the cover illustration. A collection of his black and white studies was published as Jeff Carter: Retrospective Sydney: New Holland, 2005, ISBN 9781741102130

Themes

As a photographer, Carter concentrated on the unglamorous and unprivileged aspects of Australia, with a focus on the working lives and conditions of ordinary Australians. During his early travels, his experiences as an itinerant bush worker, fruit picker, side show "urger" for a travelling boxing troupe, drover, road worker, and mill hand, brought him in contact with the people who would be the subjects of his photographs. These early years of his career filled him with admiration for those making their livings in some of the toughest environments in Australia.
Throughout his career, Carter has produced series that show the progression of events over time. Concentrating on rituals and process, they comprise evocative images.

Personal life

With Mare Carter (born USA, arr. Australia 1950, author) he settled in 1962 on a 45-hectare farm at Foxground, near the south coast town of Berry, NSW, where their two sons Goth and Vandal were born. He has two older children, Thor and Karen.

Obituary

Jeff Carter's obituary, written by Robert McFarlane, appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on 6 November 2010.

To see more of who died in 2010 click here