Down the garden path with Kathleen Carr
BY MAUREEN HURLEY
I met Kathleen Carr at a five-family barn sale during a record three-digit heat wave. The day's total sales amounted to eight dollars. There were no lakers for her wedding dress or my computer.
We swapped tales about where we'd been to and photographed—Galapagos, Nazca, the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, Haleakala, Loch Ness—and had an impromptu art show. The work she showed me—both black and white and cibachrome color prints—was among the best I've seen. One photo in particular, of a forest setting, was magical.
Delicious goosebumps chilled my arms. She said it was of Findhorn. A photo of the late Joseph Campbell, mythologist, also caught my eye. I wanted to know more. And while we munched on rice cakes and nut butter in the hot sun, she told the story of how the photographs came to be.
Stranded for 36 hours at a fork in the road to Amsterdam from Paris in 1972, Kathleen Thormond Cart literally wandered down a garden path that took her from her native California to the communities of Findhom and Esalen and her life's work. Within 15 minutes of hitching on the other road to the ferry to England, she got a ride, and an afternoon visit to the Findhom community in Scotland lasted two and a half years. She never got to Amsterdam.
Best known as a photographer in "new-age circles," 43-year-old Kathleen Carr says, "One thing that most moved me about the Findhorn community was working in cooperation with nature." Findhorn is a spiritually-based, new-age community near Inverness, Scotland where the idea of conscious cooperation was explored; and record-breaking 40-pound cabbages grew in sand dunes. Success was attributed to "devas” (angels in Sanskrit)—intelligences behind each species of plant-who hold the archetypal plan and pattern." She found it fulfilling to work as the photographic editor on Findhom projects and books including The Findhorn Garden, Faces of Findhorn, and The Findhorn Family Cookbook.
The chain of events that led to Kathleen Carr's unique career in freelance photography, publishing several photography books and establishing a thriving postcard business began in 1970, when her boyfriend was taking a photography workshop with Minor White. "I sat by the lake cooking my dinner with my dog. A man drove up and said, 'You can't camp here, but you can stay at my house." The man was the editor of Aperture, a photographic quarterly, and a publisher of fine photographic books. He said, "Make yourself at home. If you feel like it, weed the strawberries." She did such an impeccable job that he offered her the caretaking position and a job at Aperture as circulation manager and girl Friday. "It was there I got to know and handle many photographers' works," says Carr.
In 1981 an exchange program between Findhom and Esalen Institute, the fabled "human potential" think tank, led Carr to the Big Sur coast, where she met her husband, acupuncturist Craig Carr, and became a staff photographer at Esalen for several years. Now a Sebastopol resident, Carr is a recent emigreé from Big Sur, but she has spent a considerable amount of time here since 1984, after becoming involved with and traveling with the California School of Herbal Studies.
Carr is currently working on three books; one, To Honor the Earth, is in collaboration with a Findhom founder, Dorothy Maclean. Using photographs to inspire and uplift people, she hopes to "initiate change and help us heal the planet and ourselves through reconnecting with our own divine essence and nature." Says Car, "We've gotten off track trying to be who we're not—by moving away from our own truth." Carr muses, "Some art and photography reflects the negative to propel people into action. I prefer to show the beauty and magic that exist in nature and in people to inspire them to reconnect with their own inner light-to motivate people to become stewards of the earth."
She had a major photo-essay spread in Islands magazine, and many of her images have appeared in numerous journals, including Psychology Today, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, New Realities, and New Age Journal. She's had front-cover photos of actor Andre Gregory (of the movie My Dinner with Andre) and of mythologist Joseph Campbell published, plus photos and album covers of Paul Horn, Paul Winter, and Chungliang Al Huang. Commenting on My Dinner with Andre, Carr states emphatically, "The scene about the Universal Hall ceiling at Findhom lifting off like a flying saucer was totally off the wall— pure Hollywood."
Carr says the late Joseph Campbell was “so inspired about what he studied and taught. He connected myth to real life in a way that I had never experienced, and he reaffirmed the importance of continuing to follow my bliss in my life and my work." Kathleen comments, "his workshops were filled to the gills." When someone questions, "You were friends with Joseph Campbell?," Carr replies somewhat testily, "He still is my friend!"
Bornin Los Angeles, Carr bounced around the United States: Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Hawaii, Ohio and back to California. She attended high school in Redlands, and worked on the yearbook— her first exposure (pardon the pun) to the darkroom. She majored in sculpture and painting, and it wasn't until she took a photography course at UC Santa Barbara that it all finally clicked. She graduated in 1970 from Ohio University (cum laude) with a B.F.A. in photography.
At the barn sale, a customer, upon seeing her cards of Big Sur shrieks, "you made these postcards? You don't know how many of these I've bought! My grandmother loves them." Kathleen Carr has 35 postcards out, three note cards, posters, playing cards, and the latest— photo-magnets for the fridge. In the commerical photography business since 1984, Kathleen says, "The last thing I wanted to be was a businesswoman working in an office. And here I am, a businesswoman working in an office! I've hired a manager to run my postcard business. Three years of schlepping my cards around gets old fast."
Says Carr, "A lot of my work is used in the editorial and advertising marketplace, stock agencies, commercial outlets, and business."
In "The Power of Myth," a PBS interview, Joseph Campbell said to Bill Moyers, "If you follow your bliss, you put yourself in a kind of track that has been there all the while, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living." Carr has followed her bliss, doing what moved her, although at times it wasn't clear where she was headed. "The Big Sur cards were sort of an accident." When Esalen Institute ordered some postcards, Kathleen threw in a couple of coastal shots of Big Sur. Within two weeks, the postcards were sold out, and Carr Classics was born.
Carr is slowly expanding her business into the Monterey area and is looking into national distribution. Future products include Big Sur T-shirts, bookmarks and greeting cards in collaboration with a poet.
Carr's fine-art photos have been exhibited internationally at galleries, universities, and museums. She is represented by the Coast Gallery in Big Sur and wants to expand into more galleries. There was a time when she didn't want to get into the fine-arts gallery arenas at all. "While I worked at Aperture magazine, I made a conscious decision not to be involved with the arts scene. I wanted to do what moved me, what was true to me."
Selling her work at the Coast Gallery, she finds it hard to "break even" on photographs. "By the time it sells, I make 15 percent." The galleries take 50 percent. It costs over $100 to frame and mount a piece, and $45 to print. Prices are determined by whatever the public will bear. What she doesn't get paid for is her time and travel. Most people in tourist areas want something that will fit into the suitcase, unframed 5 x 7s or 8 x 10s— not museum-quality fine-art prints.
Future projects don't include a similar postcard series here in the North Bay because "someone is already doing it here," she explains. Carr is looking into national distribution, more fine-art. exhibitions, and commercial portfolio work. She wants someone to represent her work.
Also, marketing her postcards and maintaining her commercial accounts eats up a lot of time. To juggle fine art and commercial prints and to do them both well is too time-consuming. "In order to pay the bills, I keep having to push my commercial work." She will be listed this year in Art Trails.
Joseph Campbell said, " The artist is the one who communicates myths for today." The metaphor of the garden path takes Carr full circle. She works with the "devas—the archetypal blueprints" in her own backyard garden—and her photos capture plant kingdom magic.
"I am fascinated," says Carr, "by the energy I sense within the forms I'm photographing. I photograph to communicate these feelings... to explore the essence and interconnectedness of all life."
At the barn sale, a customer, upon seeing her cards of Big Sur shrieks, "you made these postcards? You don't know how many of these I've bought! My grandmother loves them." Kathleen Carr has 35 postcards out, three note cards, posters, playing cards, and the latest— photo-magnets for the fridge. In the commerical photography business since 1984, Kathleen says, "The last thing I wanted to be was a businesswoman working in an office. And here I am, a businesswoman working in an office! I've hired a manager to run my postcard business. Three years of schlepping my cards around gets old fast."
Says Carr, "A lot of my work is used in the editorial and advertising marketplace, stock agencies, commercial outlets, and business."
In "The Power of Myth," a PBS interview, Joseph Campbell said to Bill Moyers, "If you follow your bliss, you put yourself in a kind of track that has been there all the while, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living." Carr has followed her bliss, doing what moved her, although at times it wasn't clear where she was headed. "The Big Sur cards were sort of an accident." When Esalen Institute ordered some postcards, Kathleen threw in a couple of coastal shots of Big Sur. Within two weeks, the postcards were sold out, and Carr Classics was born.
Carr is slowly expanding her business into the Monterey area and is looking into national distribution. Future products include Big Sur T-shirts, bookmarks and greeting cards in collaboration with a poet.
Carr's fine-art photos have been exhibited internationally at galleries, universities, and museums. She is represented by the Coast Gallery in Big Sur and wants to expand into more galleries. There was a time when she didn't want to get into the fine-arts gallery arenas at all. "While I worked at Aperture magazine, I made a conscious decision not to be involved with the arts scene. I wanted to do what moved me, what was true to me."
Selling her work at the Coast Gallery, she finds it hard to "break even" on photographs. "By the time it sells, I make 15 percent." The galleries take 50 percent. It costs over $100 to frame and mount a piece, and $45 to print. Prices are determined by whatever the public will bear. What she doesn't get paid for is her time and travel. Most people in tourist areas want something that will fit into the suitcase, unframed 5 x 7s or 8 x 10s— not museum-quality fine-art prints.
Future projects don't include a similar postcard series here in the North Bay because "someone is already doing it here," she explains. Carr is looking into national distribution, more fine-art. exhibitions, and commercial portfolio work. She wants someone to represent her work.
Also, marketing her postcards and maintaining her commercial accounts eats up a lot of time. To juggle fine art and commercial prints and to do them both well is too time-consuming. "In order to pay the bills, I keep having to push my commercial work." She will be listed this year in Art Trails.
Joseph Campbell said, " The artist is the one who communicates myths for today." The metaphor of the garden path takes Carr full circle. She works with the "devas—the archetypal blueprints" in her own backyard garden—and her photos capture plant kingdom magic.
"I am fascinated," says Carr, "by the energy I sense within the forms I'm photographing. I photograph to communicate these feelings... to explore the essence and interconnectedness of all life."
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