Tim Carpenter Interview Number Two

Photo by Tim Carpenter.

Episode 6 of Loveheadhouse: the Photography Podcast is a second conversation with photographer Tim Carpenter. My first conversation with Tim can be heard in episode 3, but there was much more to discuss, so we waited about three weeks and recorded a second conversation.

Below are images and info based on the order in which these things come up in the interview. You can see Tim’s work on the web page for episode 3, and below you’ll mostly find the people we refer to as we talk.

Photographer Raymond Meeks was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship this year.

Robert Lyons was featured in Loveheadhouse episode 5.

Brian Young is the master printer Tim talks about, who teaches at the International Center for Photography.

We talk about Tim’s book, The King of Birds, in which he photographed his nephew.

While discussing the difficulty of portraits, Tim refers to Alec Soth.

In the same context, he mentions the photographer Richard Renaldi.

Tim also describes the way Mark Steinmetz photographs people in the contexts in which he finds them.

Doug talks about John Ashbery, the poet and art critic, who died in 2017.

The John Ashbery quote is from a review he wrote of a Willem de Kooning exhibition.

Thelonious Monk was one of the great innovators, pianists, and composers of jazz.

Photo by William P. Gottlieb.

And Mark Rothko was one of the great innovators of painting as one of the abstract expressionists of the mid-century.

Tim mentions briefly Giorgio Morandi, whose subtle palette and unusual still life paintings varied in small ways over his career.

As in episode 3, Tim refers to the great modernist poet Wallace Stevens (who once punched out Robert Frost, which Tim doesn’t mention, but which even more endears me to the man).

Pierre Bonnard is a painter whose genius I was only recently made aware of, and who painted the every-day of his life in revolutionary ways.

Joan Mitchell has long been one of Tim’s favorite painters.

Tim again refers to Robert Adams, the photographer of Western and Mid-western landscapes, especially landscapes showing the impact of human action..

The German photographer Andreas Gursky is famous for making huge-scale photographic color prints of images that have also been digitally altered.

William Blake, poet, painter, engraver, and book maker, is mentioned for his painting The Ghost of a Flea, which lives at the Tate in London, not the National Gallery.

Tim refers to the important mid-century photographer Helen Levitt, for whom Robert Lyons did darkroom printing.

As well as referring to Robert Frank, who died just last year, and who used a Leica (then considered a “miniature” camera) to photograph The Americans.

Andrea Modica created some amazingly intimate portraits with a large format camera.

Images from the book Township, which was a collaboration between Tim, Raymond Meeks, and Brad Zeller.

Brad Zeller is a writer who has collaborated on multiple projects with Alec Soth, including their ground-breaking LBM Dispatch series.

Three different issues of LBM Dispatch.

Image from Tim’s collaborative book Still Feel Gone, created with Nathan Pearce.

Tim worked with Deadbeat Club to publish Still Feel Gone.

Thomas Zipp is an artist in Berlin whose studio Tim and I visited during grad school in I believe 2011. His painter’s jacket, which Tim talks about, is the heart of a project I just completed. Check out his books here.

OK, sorry, I’m toast. Perhaps I’ll continue putting together information on the references in our conversation later on.. But for now you’re on your own. Have fun digging!