Education
Stanford University.
Stanford University.
He became a professional photographer, writer and editor while concurrently pursuing fine art photography. In New York, Carter worked as a book editor for Harper & Row from 1961-1963. Based in Beirut 1964-1966, he published in Life, the Sunday Times, Geographical Magazine and others
In 1966-1969 he freelanced from London, doing assignments for The New York Times, Women's Wear Daily, and Trans World Airlines’s Annual Report.
Returning to San Francisco in 1969, Carter turned to longer-term projects. He published his first book of text and pictures, Ghost Towns of the West, in 1971.
His second book, Middle West Country, appeared in 1975. Carter’s activities as a jazz clarinet player in the traditional New Orleans style led him to create his third book of text and photographs, Preservation Hall, in 1991.
Increasingly absorbed in fine art photography, he began exhibiting in galleries and published Illuminations, a book of nudes, in 1996.
Carter’s fifth book, Causes and Spirits: Photographs from Five Decades is an autobiographical photo-appreciation of humanity worldwide published by Steidl in 2011. Carter is currently active as a traditional-style jazz clarinetist in the Bay Area. In 1955 at the age of 20 he toured the United States. and recorded with Turk Murphy’s Jazz Band.
Since 1990 he has served as Chairman of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation.
William Carter’s photographs have been widely exhibited in the United States. and Europe. More than 150 of his black and white prints are in the permanent collection of the Jean Paul Getty Museum in Los Los Angeles
A Carter nude was shown in the Getty’s concise 150-year history of that genre in 2007-2008. Four of his Middle Eastern images appeared there in "Engaged Observers," a 2010 survey of photojournalism since 1960.
Museum collections containing photographs by William Carter:
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, California
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England
Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Collection Paris Audio-Visual, Paris, France
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France
Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Museum of Photographic Art, Odense, Denmark
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
Center for Creative Photography, Arizona
Jean Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California.
Carter was a founding board member of Photo Alliance in San Francisco from 2001-2004. He was a board member of Humanities West, also in San Francisco, from 1996-2001. He is a founding member of the Photographs Council at the Jean Paul Getty Museum from 2005 to the present.