John Carter, a curator and historian with the Nebraska State Historical Society speaks on “Ritualized Naming of the Landscape through Photography,” at 2 pm on Sunday, Oct. 14, in the New Mexico History Museum Auditorium. The lecture is free with admission; Sundays are free to NM residents.
Download a high-resolution image of Carter and images from Contemplative Landscape by clicking on "Go to related images" at the bottom of this page.
“People in Western civilization particularly have a penchant for naming and claiming places,” Carter said, “and cultures generally have a penchant for making certain places into places of power. We look at it as being something special, even though it has the same land features as other places. Then photography comes into it. Of all the things that human beings can photograph, we pick very few – your vacation, a high-school graduation, a holy place or national monument.
“The landscape becomes sanctified by virtue of human interaction, and it’s magnified every time someone gets a camera out. By that simple process, a population creates a collective value, one that is handed from generation to generation.”
A folklorist and photo historian, Carter has studied, lectured and written about photography for three decades. He has consulted on major exhibitions and television documentaries and is a grant reviewer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
Carter’s lecture is part of the programming series for the exhibits Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible and Contemplative Landscape, the latter of which showcases contemporary and historical photographs of sacred places, including Tony O’Brien’s images of Christ in the Desert Monastery. Saint John’s Abbey and University commissioned The Saint John’s Bible as a major example of that commitment—the first handwritten and illuminated Bible from the Benedictine Order in 500 years. Forty-four of its pages are on display in Illuminating the Word. The exhibits run through Dec. 30, 2012 in the museum’s second-floor Herzstein Gallery.
Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible and Contemplative Landscape are generously supported by Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., the New Mexico Humanities Council, the Scanlan Family Foundation, and the Museum of New Mexico Foundation.
