Enchanting and disturbing — the art of Julia Cart’s photography

Her monochrome images of moss-draped rural ruins and lush Lowcountry landscapes are mesmerizing reminders of this area’s heritage and beauty. But they are also melancholy mementoes of a rich cultural tableau that is falling prey to 21st-century development and social homogenization.

***image1***Take St. Helena and Edisto islands, for instance. From 1992 to 2002, the Charleston photographer immersed herself in Gullah culture on the two South Carolina Sea Islands. Using a 19th-century large-format view camera, Cart compiled a rich visual essay of a time and place that has largely vanished. She received two consecutive special project grants from the South Carolina Arts Commission while completing her work.

These photos are included in "And I’m Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island," published by Arcadia Publishing in 2000 and reissued in 2005. Cart’s collaborator, poet Nick Lindsay, transcribed interviews with two lifelong Edisto farmers, Sam Gadsden and Bubberson Brown, which give a glimpse into African-American island history and everyday life.

Alarmed by a gathering threat from development, Cart and Dana Beach, executive director of the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, used her photographs in 1993-94 to campaign for saving local Gullah landmarks. Unfortunately, bulldozers and big bucks trumped preservation and the area has been forever altered, according to Cart.

"It’s sad. I made such deep friendships with the Gullah elders, who are now gone," she said. "Most of the landscapes are gone, too. I can’t bear to go back."

***image2***Cart is an engaging, auburn-haired woman who lives in a circa 1830 home near downtown Charleston. Although she’s lived all over the world, her roots run deep here. Her grandfather, William Porter Cart, was a successful jeweler on King Street for decades.

"There’s a story in our family that Henry Ford visited my grandfather’s jewelry store when he came to Charleston and dubbed his store the ‘Tiffany of the South,’" she said.

Cart’s entrée into fine art photography was circuitous. After studying at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Goddard College in Vermont, she graduated in 1987 from the College of Charleston with a BA in fine arts. Cart also attended mime school at L’Ecole Jacques LeCoq in Paris and served in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s.

I spent two years in Senegal, West Africa where I worked in a mobile medical clinic and also helped deliver food supplies for Catholic Charities," she said.

Cart felt an instant connection with Senegalese culture, especially when she encountered local basket makers.

"I’d grown up around sweetgrass baskets in Charleston and realized that West Africa was where it all started," she recalled. "It reminded me of home."

A 1988 photography workshop taught by Fred Picker at Vermont’s Putney School proved to be a life-changing experience for Cart. He was a devotee of a contemplative style of photography using large-format view cameras.

***image3***"Picker created the Zone VI system, a variation of legendary nature photographer Ansel Adams’ method for capturing the richest and best negative while shooting in the field. It employs a common language that enables photographers to previsualize their work and to capture the wealth of different hues and gradations in a subject.

"There’s a full and rich range of contrasts in black-and-white photography, from the blackest of blacks to the whitest white," Cart said. "When Fred talked about the whitest white, he said it was where the angels live."

It’s no surprise that there is a poetic 19th-century quality to Cart’s work, whose primary field camera is an 1890 "Chambre Voyage" with its original Zeiss portrait lens.

"Most of my inspiration comes from poets and philosophers, from theater and music, all within a framework of late 19th-century and early 20th-century photography," she said. "I embrace the limitations of the early photographers’ syntax. My camera is a wooden box, I use antique printing processes in most cases, and I continue to be a respectful student of natural light."

Poetry is a visual language, Cart said, quoting German philosopher Martin Heidigger, who wrote, "Thoughts come to us, we do not come to them."

"So it is with the images that end up on my film," she said. "A wise teacher once said that nothing wants to be photographed. This simple truth has become my mantra in the field and it’s where luck, humility and a great deal of patience figure in my work. Each image is an unexpected happening that exists as its own world and simply is what it is."

Cart completed subsequent Picker workshops and plunged into fine art and portrait photography fulltime. She employs antique printing processes such as platinum/palladium and gold-toned salt prints on 100-percent cotton rag paper to render her works. Touch one of her platinum prints and you can feel the metallic texture.

"It touches another sense, like hearing a minor key in music," Cart said of the prints. "I love that."

***image4***She has served as artist-in-residence throughout the state and her photographs are in corporate and private collections as well as at the local Gibbes Museum of Art. They were displayed recently during the Gibbes exhibit that was held on Daniel Island.

Meanwhile, Cart continues to drive back roads with her tripod, camera and focusing cloth, waiting for images to speak to her.

"I’m not trying to ‘say’ anything," she said. "I try to stay out of the way. I hope that my photograph offers a point of connection for the viewer, an invitation to enter the image unhurriedly. Here is a place for reverie where some truth may be revealed."

Editor’s note: For more information about Julia Cart, visit www.juliacart.com or call (843) 577-5560. Her book, "And I’m Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island," is available at area bookstores, independent retailers, online bookstores or through Arcadia Publishing at www.arcadiapublishing.com or (888) 313-2665.