The following is an excerpt from the US Camera Annual, 1960
CARTER JONES
Once upon a time there was a bright young man who sprinkled his genius amongst the top advertising agencies as a copywriter and copy chief.
Then one day, after winning many accolades over a ten year period, he decided to “chuck it all” and go to Pars. Two days before he left, a friend thrust a Rolleiflex in his hands, no one traveled without a camera - and so, without his knowing, he had embarked on a photographic career.
Carter blessed with a visual instinct and a dynamic personality, went into action with his camera and made a hit with it. His work began to appear in the French journals and a photo essay of a beggar and nuns (shot from the window of his flat) was published in Life and reproduced in other publications around the world.
Paris cast its wondrous spell around Carter and all things seemed to go right – he did something he’d always wanted to do, studied painting at the Academy Julian, spent his leisure moments wandering through the streets making documentary studies of all that he saw around him, his pictures continued to be published. Then began a photographic liaison with the late and great Jacques Fath which led to his meeting Manine. Associated with Fath at the time, this young and beautiful French blonde, was duly courted and then married to Carter in Paris. After a year abroad they returned to the States where Mr. Jones’ photographic talents were snapped up by advertising clients. Of his work he says: “The photographer should be careful not to color things solely by his own first-impressions – but to look more deeply for the fact. The more closely he comes to catching the fact that caused the emotion, the truer our impression of the subject will be.”
At the American National Exhibition which opened in Moscow last July, Carter was proud of the fact, and rightly so, that five of his pictures had been selected as representative of the American way of life. Carter and his wife, their two girls and three boys, two cats and three dogs, live in a big rambling house in the country. On a busman’s holiday, he made most of the shots in the portfolio of his family and neighbors.
