Rarity 16.8/100 · Collector 0/100 · Deal 8.04/100 · Listings: 2 · Avg price: $52.67 · Min price: $50.33

These scores use the legacy monthly asking-price aggregate. They do not use the new exact-edition, condition, completeness, and destination-shipping rules.

In 1986 and 1987, Keith Carter and his wife, Patricia, traveled through one hundred small Texas towns, following a map marked by names such as Diddy Waw Diddy, Elysian Fields, Poetry, Uncertain, and Blue. Carter imposed a direct rule on the undertaking: although he might expose several rolls of film in each place, a single photograph would ultimately stand for each town. The resulting work considers Texas through local particularity rather than metropolitan landmarks or a comprehensive survey.

That one-town, one-picture structure gives the series both discipline and openness. Each photograph is attached to the town’s actual name, bringing geography and language into the sequence: a title may suggest a mood or story, while the image remains the record Carter selected from an encounter with a real community. The book’s subject is therefore not only small-town life, but also the photographer’s process of reducing many possible impressions to one representative frame.

Published by the University of Texas Press in 2011, this 184-page version re-envisions a body of work first issued in book form in 1988. Carter contributes a new essay tracing how an initially unplanned road trip developed into what he regarded as his first significant artistic project. Original contact sheets disclose part of the selection process, while Patricia Carter’s expanded notes supply another perspective on the places and the journey. An introduction by Texas playwright Horton Foote adds a further regional and literary frame.

For a photobook collection, From Uncertain to Blue merits attention for the unusually clear relationship between premise, itinerary, naming, editing, and sequence. Its documentary scaffolding—the map, the hundred destinations, the contact sheets, and the travelers’ separate accounts—allows the finished photographs to be read alongside the decisions that shaped them. Rather than presenting Texas as a single emblem, the book constructs it through one hundred acts of looking and choosing.