Editorial: "Koyaanisquatsi" i-D Oct98 with Shalom Harlow

Carter Smith has spent the past fifteen years travelling the world, documenting people and places in gritty detail.

After high school, he attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City with thoughts of becoming a fashion designer, but his love of photography steered him toward a career in fashion photography instead.

He has also directed music videos for many of today’s leading musical acts, documented several recording artists during their studio sessions, and finished his second feature length film called Love Rome, directed commercials, and is a widely published and skilled photographer. Most importantly though, he co-directed the Jane’s Addiction docu-drama Three Days, which followed the band throughout their entire 1997 tour.

..please check Carter Smith’s official website; Metroflix for more new projects.

..and Art+Commerce for Carter Smith’s photography portfolio

and a significant postscript for a more significant film; Koyaanisqatsi:

ko.yaa.nis.qatsi(from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life 2. life in turmoil 3. life disintegrating 4. life out of balance 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living

"The film’s role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter. The encounter is my interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, than propaganda and advertising is the form. So in the sense of art, the meaning of KOYAANISQATSI is whatever you wish to make of it. This is its power!" -Godfrey Reggio

Koyaanisqatsi is the first film of Quatsi Trilogy, directed by Godfrey Reggio, created between 1975 and 1982. The film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds — urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass. The other films are Powaqqatsi (life in transformation) and Naqoyqatsi (life as war).

Reggio is prominent in the film world for his QATSI trilogy, essays of visual images and sound which chronicle the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment. Reggio, who spent 14 years in silence and prayer while studying to be a monk, has a history of service not only to the environment but to youth street gangs, the poor, and the community as well.