artpaul cartier: Who We Are
Artpaul cartier was born in Sacramento, California, in 1951. His father was a writer and educator, and his mother a musician.
He was immediately whisked off to the Old South of Florida and Alabama. This was the South of Dixie, segregation, George Wallace, and Freedom Rides. But every two years there was a pilgrimage across parts of the US, touching on practically every state, and visiting family and friends, mostly in the West. Later, as a preteen, there was another move, this time to San Antonio, Texas.
Graduating from High School, he escaped to Michigan, and found the counterculture and radical politics. A few years later, he was in Toronto, safe from the draft and Richard Nixon. By 1976, after a few years of being an illegal immigrant with little hope of becoming a citizen of Canada, he took a long trip by train and bus and plane down through Mexico, Central America, and finally, Lima, Peru. There, he lost his passport, tickets and money - except for a few bills sewn into his pant cuffs. But he still had his clothes and his trusty Olympus OM1, so he hopped the slow bus to Cuzco. He had taken Kodachrome slides and Ilford HP5 all the way south, but he had saved some for the Andes of the Incas.
Within a year of his return, he had moved to San Francisco to study photography at City College, studying with Susan Felter, John Harding and Morrie Camhi.
He began to seek jobs having to do with photography: selling cameras, freelancing, creating multi-image slide shows, assisting, printing, and taking portraits and clinical photographs.
Many years later, in 2004, he finished his undergraduate education at the San Francisco Art Institute. During those two long years, he experimented not only with 8X10 field cameras, lomos, and the rapidly improving digital SLR’s, but also with cyanotypes, Van Dyke prints, Platinum/Palladium, and text overlays. He studied under Susannah Hays, Jack Fulton, Richard Berger, and Henry Wessel. He spent hours in the labs, and in the library studying many other photographers. And Marcel Duchamp.
Moreover, he soon realized that he was learning and getting ideas from his fellow students, as well. Several of them helped to translate his text, ‘Waiting for War’, into German, Malay, Chinese, and Russian to superimpose on his images, thereby giving them a new charge. He learned about the rediscovered art of the artist book, and the documentation of topographies, culminating in the rigor of the Doctor’s Bag, a text and photo-documentation of the exterior and inventory of the contents of a doctor’s emergency bag, as a time capsule from the early 1960’s. Here, too, was the beginning of ultra-short stories, associated with photos of the bag on a bench, on the street and at the beach.
He was immediately whisked off to the Old South of Florida and Alabama. This was the South of Dixie, segregation, George Wallace, and Freedom Rides. But every two years there was a pilgrimage across parts of the US, touching on practically every state, and visiting family and friends, mostly in the West. Later, as a preteen, there was another move, this time to San Antonio, Texas.
Graduating from High School, he escaped to Michigan, and found the counterculture and radical politics. A few years later, he was in Toronto, safe from the draft and Richard Nixon. By 1976, after a few years of being an illegal immigrant with little hope of becoming a citizen of Canada, he took a long trip by train and bus and plane down through Mexico, Central America, and finally, Lima, Peru. There, he lost his passport, tickets and money - except for a few bills sewn into his pant cuffs. But he still had his clothes and his trusty Olympus OM1, so he hopped the slow bus to Cuzco. He had taken Kodachrome slides and Ilford HP5 all the way south, but he had saved some for the Andes of the Incas.
Within a year of his return, he had moved to San Francisco to study photography at City College, studying with Susan Felter, John Harding and Morrie Camhi.
He began to seek jobs having to do with photography: selling cameras, freelancing, creating multi-image slide shows, assisting, printing, and taking portraits and clinical photographs.
Many years later, in 2004, he finished his undergraduate education at the San Francisco Art Institute. During those two long years, he experimented not only with 8X10 field cameras, lomos, and the rapidly improving digital SLR’s, but also with cyanotypes, Van Dyke prints, Platinum/Palladium, and text overlays. He studied under Susannah Hays, Jack Fulton, Richard Berger, and Henry Wessel. He spent hours in the labs, and in the library studying many other photographers. And Marcel Duchamp.
Moreover, he soon realized that he was learning and getting ideas from his fellow students, as well. Several of them helped to translate his text, ‘Waiting for War’, into German, Malay, Chinese, and Russian to superimpose on his images, thereby giving them a new charge. He learned about the rediscovered art of the artist book, and the documentation of topographies, culminating in the rigor of the Doctor’s Bag, a text and photo-documentation of the exterior and inventory of the contents of a doctor’s emergency bag, as a time capsule from the early 1960’s. Here, too, was the beginning of ultra-short stories, associated with photos of the bag on a bench, on the street and at the beach.
Among many others, he was influenced by:
Robert Frank ( for the “alien eye” looking at the familiar), Gary Winogrand (for the expansion of subject and composition), Diane Arbus (for the openness to, and celebration of, the unusual), Stephen Shore ( for the addition of color to composition), Lee Friedlander (for wanting to see how something looks photographed), Richard Misrach (for combining beauty with humanity and the political). Marcel Duchamp (just because). |
In 2004, The San Francisco Art Institute recognized his work by presenting him with the Paul Sack Building Award. Under Mariella Poli, his portfolio on acrobats in training went to SF City Hall, the Diego Rivera Gallery, the Italian Cultural Center, and finally, to Italy.
Since then, his work has been selected by art dealer Nancy Toomey and curators Hanna Regev and Matt McKinley for San Francisco exhibitions, such as the 2015 Bearing Witness: Surveillance in the Drone Age” featured at the San Francisco International Art Festival (2015). His work has been widely exhibited in San Francisco at galleries such as the Walter McBean Gallery, The Diego Rivera Gallery, and SF MOMA Artist Gallery as well as in select exhibitions curated by the San Francisco Arts Commission. His work is included in permanent collections of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Palazzina dei Giardini in Modena, Italy, and the San Francisco Public Library Special Collections. Cartier lives and maintains his studio practice in San Francisco, CA. |