The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Keith Carter's 'Mojo'

March 1993

A photo book’s occult images radiate songs like “Losing My Religion”

Keith Carter’s Mojo is an oversize book of fifty-five black-and-white photographs; it takes its cue, says an introductory page facing a photo of a black woman wielding garlic stalks like spears, from the African KiKongo word Mooyo meaning ‘spiritual spark,’ ‘force,’ or ‘soul.” Very nice, but, like the African-Amer­ican word “mojo,” Carter’s pictures suck up other meanings: hex, trick, spell, curse, magic, death.

Shot in Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana, with four images from Mexico, the photographs are sometimes merely striking: a traditional southern bottle tree leaning just like the Tower of Pisa. Oth­erwise, they’re a lookout onto the uncanny: a pig­tailed black girl, shot from behind, the tufts of her hair so defined and gravity-defiant it seems each has its own little will, or mission. Old mystical blues songs snake out of the pages, and so do new ones. Mojo encompasses small, dressed-up white children at a garden party and the bulging torso of a scarecrow that looks more like a week-old corpse from Jonestown; Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ Stone” fades seamlessly into R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.”

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In her introduction to Mojo, novelist Rosellen Brown asks if Carter’s pictures “constitute a world of individuals and their unique experiences” or “a shared landscape and a set of lived assumptions.” For once, an art question is easy to answer. Carter absolutely posits a landscape. It’s a terrain at once objectively, externally particular and subjectively, internally boundless, and probably no one has ever described it better than novelist and short-story writer Clark Blaise. “I grew up,” Blaise writes in “The Voice of Unhousement,” a memoir collected in his 1986 book Resident Alien, “on the wild shores of Lake Harris and Lake Griffin in central Florida, back in a time when they were utterly savage. Somehow, I ingested the sights and smells of pu­trescence, and of a primordial, unspoiled plenti­tude that has now vanished from the common experience, even of Floridians.” It was, he says, “a touch of the living prehistory of the planet and a triggering of the brain’s own disremembered past.” Then Blaise goes on to line out a picture that is missing from Carter’s Mojo only because Carter didn’t happen to be around to shoot it:

I remember even now a spectacle that belongs in Hieronymus Bosch. Dozens of mudfish nailed by their tails to cypress trees in front of a moss-picker’s shanty. Those fish, their primitive lungs permitting life out of water for days at a time, whacking the trees with their heads, their air-bladders making Donald Duck noises, while sand-castle drippings of black mud built up under the propped-open mouths.

And so the images of the unconscious were planted early and privately by the peculiar wealth of southern poverty, and I grew to believe in the co­existence, or the simultaneity, of visible and occult worlds: duplicities, masks, hidden selves, discard­ed languages, altered names, things not being what they seemed.

This is precisely the terrain shared by Carter’s Mojo pictures and a certain strain of American mu­sic—and if Blaise’s litany of “masks, hidden selves, discarded languages” tracks every step of the vocal dance Michael Stipe makes in “Losing My Religion,” then the notion of “images of the unconscious” is a key to Carter’s work. There’s a moment in Muddy Wa­ters’s 1950 “Rollin’ Stone”—a country blues song recorded solo with electric guitar—when a big bass note rises toward the theme, bends under pressure, and then bursts. What is revealed is no image in the unconscious but something like Blaise’s im­age of the unconscious, a power you may not want to know about, and also just a counter in a piece of rhythm—and that sense of the bursting of the ordinary, of the functional, is present all through Carter’s pictures. You look at a domino table and all but seek to repress the feeling you’re looking at Stonehenge. You squint at an old, rolled Bible on an altar table and believe that reading it would not be like reading any other Bible. You wonder about the violence of motive that has produced the cruel stillness so many of Carter’s subjects bring to their poses (assuming it’s not a stillness Carter waited for)—a stillness that, in picture after picture, of humans and animals, makes it hard to tell if the subject is dead or alive.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. There are dead animals here, for certain, but there is also an aura of death in almost every photograph, just as there is in “Baby Face” Leroy Foster’s weird 1950 “Rollin’ & Tumblin’ Part 1,” Muddy Waters and Little Walter pounding out the incantatory rhythm behind him, the three men moaning, wailing, never uttering a recognizable word, as if seeking that discarded language. You can’t always tell what you’re looking at with Carter, any more than “Losing My Religion” ever hesitates in its swaying long enough for you to single out a meaning: in Mojo a pig’s head is as indistinct as Robert Mapplethorpe’s picture of a bloody penis forced through a hole in a board, and an old kid’s toy, a stuffed elephant, looks like an elephant fetus floating in a bottle of formaldehyde.

Real mojo music isn’t music where the singer brags he’s got a mojo—brags that he’s got magic, power, that he’s going to make his lover do his will. Real mojo music carries a sense of transformation, the sensation that the body, like the soul, is unfixed, unstable—that just as the mind can think any thought and defend against none, the body can take any shape, at any time. This is Carter’s argument, or his eye. His greatest strength is in his understanding of the mojo as a look, a gesture, an abstinence—a performance, both ritualistic and instinctive, of the occult contours of everyday life.

His picture Hanging Alligator is so fierce a version of this performance it makes you wonder how the picture came to be—that is, did Carter simply come across this hideous apparition on a country ramble, or did he think it up, find himself an alligator, and hang it from a tree? It’s hard to decide which would be better, or worse. The picture is just what it sounds like, though something as strange as “hanging alligator” doesn’t really sound like anything. An enormous, dank, terrifying alligator has a rope around its neck; the animal dangles in the air. Behind it is a tree. The feeling is that of suspension, between events—what happens next?

There’s no gainsaying this image: the alligator has been lynched. As you wonder why, another, older notion can creep off the page—an echo of a discarded language. Some American Indian tribes believed that each human had a kindred animal spirit; that when the human died, that spirit revealed itself, the animal body shrouding the human body, which disappeared as if it had never been. You can’t go much further into mojo than that, and Carter has gone that far. The longer you look at his hanging alligator, the more you want to know about the human who was hung.

(Originally published in Interview Magazine, March 1993.)

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After the publication of this column, Keith Carter asked me to write an afterword for his next collection, Heaven of Animals, published by Rice University Press in 1995. It follows here.

From Keith Carter: Fifty Years, at Rubenstein Art Center, Duke University, 2018

What’s living, and what’s dead?  A string of lit, draped lamps hung on a line looks like a coven of Klansmen gathered for their own mass lynching (“Ghosts”).  A party dress is hung on a wall, yet askew, as if there’s an invisible inhabitant inside it, caught in the middle of a dance, right leg kicking high (“Jessamin’s Gown”).  His head turned to one side and out of focus in the background, a young boy holds a tortoise, shot from below in sharp focus, as if for sacrifice (“Turtle Shell”).  A man and a boy stand before a fire; the man’s expression conveys the knowledge of the adept (he may not like what he sees, but he knows he can do nothing about it), while the little boy framed by the man’s outstretched arms as a presumptive initiate, looks suspicious: What I am I getting into (“Open Arms”)?  Shot from above, a bandana is wrapped around a head, but a small tear looks like a bullet hole (“Star Bandana”).

Yet there is little menace in these pictures, and no hint of an artist seeking the weird, the damaged, the damned.  Rather there is a sense of some grand, age-old ritual underway, with each figure in these pages—the living often looking toward death, the inanimate as likely caught in postures of the animate—positioned to assume an appointed role.  When the sun goes down (in some pictures), or when the sun comes up (in others), at some point well past the last page of the book, there will be resolution.  Everyone and everything will remove masks, reclaim faces and bodies, and go back to ordinary life. You kind of hope so, at any rate.

Except that such a dramatization, as a frame for Keith Carter’s photographs in Heaven of Animals, is only a first, most blatant impression, and I think partly wrong.  Whether staged, posed, arranged, or found, the gapped narrative here is, on second look, fully a narrative of ordinary life—and even more so than in Carter’s previous collection, the talismanic Mojo.  The difference between one’s expectations and Carter’s pictures—the difference that produces a first impression of mask and performance—is that in these pages the ordinary is sacralized.  Nothing is without meaning or suggestion.  What politics does in Robert Frank’s The Americans—Frank’s European eye for American strangeness; his beat generation refusal to trust that the subjects of his pictures know their own mind; his construction, in other words, of a seemingly stumbled-upon panorama of alienation—religion does in Heaven of Animals.

If Carter’s pictures are religious, though, it isn’t because they are premised on, or even refer to, any personalized deity, or for that matter any deity at all.  Instead they are based in a constant, continual, renewed and renewing apprehension of powers finally beyond human control or ken, though not in any way alien from the human.  Religion is perhaps alive here as it was in Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, his landmark six-LP compendium of traditional music as it was commercially recorded between 1926 and 1932.  Those years comprised a moment when northern record companies suddenly realized there were specialized markets throughout the American South for gospel, blues, Cajun airs, Elizabethan ballads handed down over the generations; they also comprised a window opening onto a seemingly infinite past.  Here, Dick Justice’s “Henry Lee,” the tale of a murder witnessed by a parrot, is as suffused with religious awe as the Rev. J. M. Gates’s “Oh Death Where Is They Sting,” and Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” more otherwordly—and less at home in this world—than the Memphis Sanctified Singers’ “He Got Better Things for You.”  There is no single message in Smith’s eighty-four selections, but as a whole they leave one with the sensation that we are all of us caught up in an affair that has more to do with fate than will.  As active participants rather than simply unknowing victims, human beings enter this affair through ritual.  In the case of Smith’s Anthology, they do so through the performance of traditional pieces of music; the figures in Hevean of Animals do so by assuming postures that seem just as traditional, which is to say just as much theirs, and just as much not theirs.

The sort of rituals one might glimpse in Carter’s pictures—the boy with the tortoise, the man and boy before the fire—might be entered into purposefully, by means of schooling in traditions commonplace or occult.  They might be entered into as if by accident, when a sensory perception or a physical movement that has occurred countless times before somehow occurs in a different manner, producing a great shock—a shock of union with all creation, a shock of displacement from all things known.  This may be a momentary happenstance, barely recognized, stored in the psyche but forgotten like a dream.  It’s also possible that, for the ritualist—or for the observer who, by some truly unsettling logic, apprehends what the ritualist does not—nothing will ever be the same.

I have been attempting to draw out an argument, or a hunch, that I think underlies Keith Carter’s work; it seems to me that it is most intensely realized in Heaven of Animals in a series of disturbingly anthropomorphic animal photographs.  What makes them of a piece—if they are—is the vibrating sense that the subjects of these pictures are not exactly animals at all: that they are animistic apparitions, souls in the process of transferring from human to animal form, or vice versa.

A white dog swimming urgently, or desperately, through dark water toward some unseen destination, its black eyes so indistinct they could be holes in its head (“Black Water”)—is the shore it’s pulling for the human shape it once inhabited?  In an otherwise empty church, a dog takes its place, as it’s done so many times before; its position is penitential, rapt with attention (“Dog in Church”).  This dog clearly belongs where it is, is at home there, knows where it is; is it, as some American Indian tribes believed their animal doubles would do for them after death, hosting the soul of a now-vanished, once-pious congregant?

The dark, withered neck of a tortoise extends to the sky (“Tortoise”).  The posture is familiar.  It has been seen again and again, for decades, in photographs of African-American worshippers in religious ecstasy, reaching for the spirit or being touched by it.  The posture is now so familiar—or to our learned eye seemingly so inherently human, so much not learned or cultural—that after a first glance this creature doesn’t even look like a tortoise.  There are of course many pictures in Heaven of Animals that appear unburdened by any such meanings—but they are not the same pictures each time one pages through the book.

The suggestion of transfers between animals and humans is ultimately, here, a variation of on the larger theme of transfers between life and death: Carter’s quietly assuming, determined insistence that the borders between the two states are less fixed, and more fluid, than we might, for purposes of efficient and predictable conduct of our everyday affairs, than we like to think.  Working from his home in East Texas, as a photographer Carter has for years read signs, printed up what he has found, and presented the results to the public, and he has done so as if he were partly a scientist, partly a shaman, and mostly a spiritualist.  For at a certain edge, Carter’s most characteristic images are precisely spiritualist, whether they are “Black Water,” “Jessamin’s Gown,” or “Turtle Shell.”  It’s as if the figures in these pictures are trying to make contact with the dead, or as if they appear as they do because the dead are trying to make contact with them.

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