ROBERT C. MAY PHOTOGRAPHY LECTURE SERIES: TIM CARPENTER

Exhibiting artist and writer Tim Carpenter discusses his photographs of semi-rural America and his distinct publications. Visit the Museum after the lecture to see his work on view.

Tim Carpenter is a photographer, writer, and educator who works in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He is known for his precise B&W images of homes, roads, trees, powerlines, and other elements in the landscape. He has said, "Making photographs is all about creating relationships that don’t exist in the real world, while getting to use subject matter that clearly does exist in the real world."

Carpenter is the author of several photobooks, among them A month of Sundays (TIS books); Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road (The Ice Plant); and Local objects (The Ice Plant), among others.  His most recent book, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die,  is a book-length essay about the essential usefulness of the practice of making photographs. He on the writings of Wallace Stevens and dozens of other poets, artists, musicians and thinkers, arguing that photography is unique among the arts in its capacity for easing the fundamental ache of our mortality; for managing the breach that separates the self from all that is not the self; for enriching one’s sense of freedom and personhood; and for cultivating meaning in an otherwise meaningless reality. 

Carpenter received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School in 2012, and in 2015 co-founded TIS books, an independent photobook publisher. He is a faculty member of the Penumbra Foundation Long Term Photobook Program and serves as a mentor in the Image Threads Mentorship Program.