Carter’s life’s work, to be published in a new collection next year titled “Fifty Years” (University of Texas Press), amounts to a vast tribute to Texas and to Beaumont, whose “claims to fame are the oil boom—Spindletop blew here—some legendary area musicians (Janis Joplin, Gatemouth Brown, Johnny and Edgar Winter), frenzied hurricanes, and honking big mosquitoes,” as Carter once wrote in Texas Monthly. But what interests Carter even more than the stories Texas tells about itself are the everyday figures—idle kids, blue-collar workers, animals both domesticated and less so—that contribute to the state’s mythology.

“Fireflies,” 1992.

In the nineteen-nineties, having earned recognition for his documentary work, Carter began to experiment with a new visual language. His most well-known image, “Fireflies,” from 1992, shows two prepubescent boys holding a glowing jar, their forms out of focus and framed by a dark halo of magnolia branches. His subsequent work brought figures and light together to create beguiling images that read like Southern-gothic poems. In “Stairway,” a silhouetted figure ascends a ghostly flight of white steps to nowhere. In “Bubble,” a plastic sphere, emerging like an optical illusion from a blurred creek in the background, hides a young boy who seems to be attempting extraterrestrial communication.