Born in Brooklyn, New York, Steve Carver received his first camera when he was eight years old. At thirteen, he began his formal education in photography, attending the High School of Music & Arts in Manhattan where he received training in art and music. Fascinated by techniques of creating imagery, he experimented with situations to maximize his learning experience--testing and exploring the creative limitations of the mediums. Attending the University of Buffalo in New York on a Regents Scholarship, Carver developed an interest in photography while studying commercial art and illustration. Determined to learn the entire photographic process, he served an apprenticeship under several professional photographers and gained invaluable technical knowledge. It was his willingness to explore ideas and adapt his skills to new situations that resulted in creating an impressive portfolio of his work. Following the completion of his undergraduate studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Carver accepted a fellowship to study the classical arts at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Inspired by insightful portrait photography, he attempted to broaden the scope of his study by serious practice. Establishing himself as a freelance portraitist, he began his career with limited success and encouragement. Determined to work as a photographer, Carver promptly undertook a photojournalist assignment on a documentary film. By learning the flexibility and immediacy that the work required, he gained valuable experience that contributed to his artistic vision of observed life. The experience also sowed the seed for Carver's interest in storytelling. He increasingly devoted his time to studying the creative process of filmmaking. In his final year at graduate school, Carver was a mature artist who had a passion for the visual arts and whose goals were vividly conceived. He rejected a conventional presentation of his thesis in favor of creating a film as a deliberate aesthetic choice to enhance the collective nature of his artwork with visual excitement and inventiveness. Working feverishly, Carver prepared a scenario that incorporated an assemblage of images derived from his photographs, paintings, drawings, and etchings. While he labored with the arduous and complicated process, the single-minded intensity and pure ambition that he brought to the task ultimately motivated the completion of his first film. The achievement earned Carver a Master of Fine Arts degree and reinforced a new objectivity. During the next two years, Carver devoted himself to studying filmmaking while concentrating primarily on photography and art. Resuming his freelance career, he worked as a conceptual artist, contract photographer, lecturer, film consultant, and sometimes journalist. After a brief period, he accepted an invitation to attend a special postgraduate program in photojournalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Under a core group of staff photographers from Life Magazine, Carver began studying the techniques of pictorial journalism. By drawing upon his unique vision and the imagery of culture, he built a portfolio of photographs that explored the interstices connecting culture, art and the artist. Returning to St. Louis, he exhibited his work at a Fine Arts gallery and enjoyed both critical and commercial success. The notoriety earned Carver a teaching position at Florissant Valley College and offers of employment. Dividing his time working as both photography instructor and freelance photojournalist, he contributed to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Wide World of Sports, Architectural Digest, National Geographic and Time-Life. He later became a staff photographer for United Press International, where he developed a documentary portrait style producing a significant body of work. While photojournalism inspired his creativity, Carver maintained a fascination of filmmaking. On weekends, he enjoyed the challenge of experimenting and exploring its technical process by exposing and editing thousands of feet of 16mm film. For inspiration, he turned to the work of documentary filmmakers and the intellectual stimulation provided by friends. Principally self-taught, he began taking on assignments as a cameraman and film editor. While teaching photography and filmmaking at the Metropolitan Education Council in the Arts in St. Louis, he began producing educational films that documented urban life and attitudes under the auspices of the St. Louis Mayor's Council on the Arts. Subsequently, the photo-documentaries created collections of collectible images, dramatically increasing his productivity as well as his profitability. Despite his best efforts, however, the work exhausted Carver's interests in art and photography of all kinds. At the invitation of the American Film Institute in Beverly Hills, California, he shifted the focus of his efforts and relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a formal education in filmmaking. During the next twenty years, he stopped photographing professionally and rarely used a still camera. While attending the fellowship program at the Center for Advanced Film Studies, Carver studied screenwriting, film directing and editing, exclusively as a student. His principal mentors were great directors, producers, and actors. Their counsel contributed enormously to his education in film and provided an outstanding professional atmosphere. Through the apprenticeship program at the Directors Guild, Carver gained employment as an assistant director and developed a technical aptitude for the craft. As a result, he bridged the gap into the movie industry and received his first directorial assignment, establishing himself as a feature film director. Directing movies for theater and TV throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, he concentrated on his directing career, making good use of his creative vision developed through photography. While working on location in Moscow, after receiving a still camera as a gift, Carver renewed his interest in photography by undertaking a series of photographic expeditions throughout Russia. Following his return to Los Angeles, after receiving a proposal of a business partnership, he decided to take a break from directing and turned his attention to a different kind of creative enterprise--establishing a photography business located at Venice Beach. The opening of The Darkroom, however, coincided with the demise of the partnership, and there began Carver's extended stay, which was ultimately for five years. From the outset, he held the distinction of being the exclusive owner, operator, technician, educator, and photographer, and labored with rentals and services that supported the facility. Largely self-taught, he quickly came to terms with the arduous business process. Since his technical skills relied heavily on the precepts and techniques that he learned over twenty years ago, he began to focus his efforts on encompassing new photographic technology to stimulate diversity in his work. To maximize production, he practiced, concentrating more and more on photography, adapting his idiosyncratic working methods. Working independently, he explored the boundaries of his classical photographic vision in black-and-white, and by using applications of early chemical processes as a means of documenting the evolving ideas and facets of his work, he liberally incorporated the technology from his explorations into his photography as a means of expression. Gradually, it allowed him to produce photographs of exceptional depth and quality. As a result, The Darkroom gained popularity and increasingly attracted a core group of photographic artists and serious students. While his techniques and methods became the subject and inspiration of a diverse body of photographs, as a portraitist, Carver began creating sensuous and moody figure studies that he considered being among his highest artistic achievements. As expressive formalism incorporating a traditional classic sensibility, his portraiture provided a stylish and diverse cultural document, serving to chronicle life and culture while conveying the emotional, psychological, and spiritual as opposed to merely rendering a likeness. He also produced photo-transformations of people in motion, isolating successive stages of rapid movement by using long exposures to permit the intrusion of motion into the image, as both a means of expression and transformation. These images typically included insightful psychological compositions, involving precise staging, elaborate props, and direction. Psychologically probing and surreal, the images often involved the use of light abstractions, color-frequency alteration, long-exposure techniques, split-filter printing, solarization, and archival chemical toning. Carver became affiliated with conservators and scientists in an effort to interact with private collectors, archivists, and curators, to further the development of his work in archival preservation of historical prints and negatives. He appropriated images from archives and private collections in order to raise issues of cultural heritage. Primarily produced and used as source material for scholars and as telling documentation to ensure the preservation of cultural heritages, he created replicas and duplicates of photographs that characteristically challenged perception of its originality. While the closing of the lab allowed Carver to resume his career as a director, his ambition now is to create exceptional collections of formal portraiture for wide publication. It is his hope that these informative photographic studies will offer new interpretations and contribute to the necessary preservation of cultural heritages.
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