Norman Carr

(Akron, Ohio, 1936 - )

American

A former attorney, Carr took up photography in retirement during the early 2000s while living in Washington DC. Carr’s black and white street photography includes sites all over the world and favors city streets that include abandoned storefronts, building construction, and bustling foot-traffic. Similar to Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand, his works capture the chaos of a busy city street, yet by training his lens directly through store windows, he captures a unique perspective through the use of the window’s reflections and refractions. In an exhibition essay by the curator Paul Roth he notes that Carr’s practice is unique in that “rather than organize the space inside his frame in the manner of other street photographers, looking for purposeful design and interaction, Carr journeys through the street as though through the looking glass, embracing visual confusion in search of some larger truth. Like distortion mirrors at a carnival, Norman Carr’s photographs reveal us in ways we otherwise would not see, hinting at the deepest 
mysteries of everyday life.”
What results from his turn toward the glass window is an incomprehensible street scene—people passing, interior and exterior spaces, construction fencing, graffiti writing—all flattened into abstraction. His use of formal strategies captures the city in this way—telescoping and compressing space with zoom lenses, encouraging lens flares and grain. In the darkroom, Carr dodges and burns certain areas in the image, pulling out details in order to further layer the scene. The resulting photograph is never created through multiple exposures or overlay of negatives in the darkroom

Washington, D.C., United States

https://www.ncarrstudio.com/contact

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