Edmund Snow Carpenter - Visual Media

Visual Media

In 1959, Carpenter joined anthropologist Raoul Naroll at San Fernando Valley State College (California State University-Northridge) and was appointed an assistant professor and founder of an experimental interdisciplinary program of Anthropology and Art, where students were trained in visual media, including filming. As the only faculty member in the new department, Carpenter went on to hire more faculty. In 1960, he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1961, he was made Chairman of the Anthropology Department.

With award-winning filmmaker Robert Cannon, he made an innovative documentary about "surrealist" Kuskokwim Eskimo masks. Carpenter also co-authored Georgia Sea Island Singers (1964), a film documenting six traditional African-American songs and dances by Gullahs of St. Simon Island, based on fieldwork by Alan Lomax. And with Bess Lomax Hawes, he collaborated on Buck Dancer (1965), a short film featuring Ed Young, an African-American musician-dancer from Mississippi. In 1967, however, just when visual anthropology began to take institutional form as an academic enterprise, the program was closed.

During this period, Carpenter worked with McLuhan on the latter's book Understanding Media (1964). In 1967 McLuhan was awarded the Schweitzer Chair at Fordham University, and he brought Carpenter (on a sabbatical from Northridge), Harley Parker, and Eric McLuhan to be on his research team.

On leave from his faculty position at Northridge, Carpenter subsequently held the Carnegie Chair in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1968–69), and then took a research professorship at the University of Papua New Guinea, officially having resigned his position at Northridge. Joined by photographer Adelaide de Menil (who later became his wife), he journeyed to remote mountain areas where indigenous Papua had “no acquaintance” yet with writing, radios, or cameras. They took numerous Polaroid and 35mm photographs, made sound recordings, and shot some 400,000 feet of 16mm film in black and white, as well as color and infrared film.

During the next dozen years, Carpenter taught at various universities, including Adelphi University (circa 1970-1980), Harvard, New School University, and New York University (circa 1980-1981). In addition to numerous other publications, he also completed art historian Carl Schuster's massive cross-cultural study on traditional art motifs.

In 2008, he guest-curated an important Eskimo traditional and prehistoric art exhibit Upside Down: Les Arctiques at the Musée du quai Branly, the ethnographic art museum in Paris, France. This exhibit was re-installed in 2011 as Upside Down: Arctic Realities at The Menil Collection, an art museum in Houston, Texas, which, since 1999, also houses his permanent exhibit Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision.