Tim Carpenter

About Episode 58

In this episode of PhotoWork, Sasha and photographer, writer and educator, Tim Carpenter discuss his book, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die, published by The Ice Plant. Tim also talks about the importance of seeing a place over time as a way of seeing how you, yourself, have changed over time and how he let go of the idea of subject matter.

Tim Carpenter (Illinois, 1968) is a photographer, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn and central Illinois. He is the author of several photo books, among them A month of Sundays (TIS books); Christmas Day, Bucks Pond Road (The Ice Plant); Local objects (The Ice Plant); township (collaboration with Raymond Meeks, Adrianna Ault, and Brad Zellar; TIS/dumbsaint); Bement grain (TIS/dumbsaint); Still feel gone (collaboration with Nathan Pearce; Deadbeat Club Press); Illinois central (Kris Graves Projects); The king of the birds (TIS books); and A house and a tree (TIS books). Local objects was included in the 2018 exhibition “American Surfaces and the Photobook” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was listed for the Kassel Photobook Award 2018. 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, serves as a mentor in the Image Threads Mentorship Program, and is a co-proprietor of Distant Zine. Carpenter’s book-length essay “To photograph is to learn how to die” was published by The Ice Plant in Fall of 2022.

Artist Links:

Website

Instagram

Episode Resources:

TIS Books, The Ice Plant, Penumbra Foundation, Hartford MFA

People Mentioned:

Ron Jude, Doug Dubois, Mary Frey, Alec Soth, Nelson Chan, Carl Woolley, Roland Barthes, Jenia Fridlyand, John Gossage, Justine Kurland, Steve Smith, Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens, Flannery O’Connor, Tricia Gabriel, Mike Slack, Terri Weifenbach, Adam Meeks, John Elderfield, Joel Sternfeld, Terry Toedtmeier, Robert Lyons, Adrianna Ault, Martin Heidegger, Brad Zellar, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, David Foster Wallace, Robert Adams, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore