Son of Richard Carter & Eliza Elizabeth Shadbolt

Married Sarah Stockdale, 31 Aug 1863, Plymouth, Devon, England

Married Annie Crawford, 22 Aug 1873, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah

During the Crimean War, a young soldier in the British army became interested in photography and decided to pursue the vocation after he was mustered out of the service. From sketchy information that survives, Charles William Carter learned photography sometime during the war. It is not clear just where he served or whether he saw action on the battlefront, but the tall, angular soldier took up the camera shortly after the collodion or wet-plate process forced daguerreotypy into obsolescence in the mid-1850s. Coincidental with Carter's interest in photography, Roger Fenton, secretary of the Photographic Society of London, was the first to document the battlefields of war. Fenton traveled to the Crimea in 1855 with a wagon fitted out as a darkroom and photographed many memorable scenes of the conflict, including the cannonball-strewn battlefield over which the famous Light Brigade charged. There is no evidence to suggest a connection between Carter and Fenton, but the feat of photo-documenting war proved the portability of the wet-plate process and undoubtedly influenced Carter's later frontier camera techniques.

Sometime after the Paris Peace Treaty ended the war in 1856, Carter worked as a schoolmaster, teaching photography on the side. It is not known exactly when or how Carter joined the Mormon Church, but missionaries baptized him sometime between 1856 and 1858.

Carter's daughter, the late Mary Carter Osborn of Salt Lake City, remembered him as being tall, slender, reserved, and intellectual, and as having a keen sense of humor. When interviewed at age ninety-two, Mrs. Osborn had difficulty remembering details of her father's life. According to her account, as well as genealogical records, Carter was born August 4, 1832, in London. After his conversion to Mormonism, he came to Utah with several sisters (three or four—Mrs. Osborn was not quite sure), and three friends. About twenty-five miles out of Fort Bridger, the wagon broke down and Carter, his sisters, and friends had to walk the rest of the way to Salt Lake City, arriving sometime before the winter of 1859. At one time in his career, Carter apparently worked for C. R. Savage, but the length of employment and the time are not known.

Mrs. Osborn remembered her father's saying he spent two hundred dollars for his first wet-place cameras and set up a gallery on Main Street. Later, he moved his gallery to Main and Third South streets. According to Mrs. Osborn, one of the wealthy Walker brothers built her father's first gallery. Carter remained at the Third South location for many years, and his painted sign on the front of the building became a familiar sight. In 1887, the front of the building advertised his services:

Views! 1,000 1st Select from Cabinet, Stereoscope, and album—Utah Scenery, Notabilities, Indians etc.—C. W. Carter, Portrait and View Photographer.

As a child, Mrs. Osborn remembered visiting her father at his studio and playing on the chair where the headrest was fastened in front of a huge, wooden view camera. His darkroom, she recalled, was very small, measuring only about ten feet square.

The wet-plate process which Carter and his contemporaries used depended on the portability of their cameras and darkroom equipment. Glass plates had to be coated with guncotton (collodion) mixed with excitants like bromine, sensitized in silver salts, loaded in holders while still wet, exposed in the camera while the emulsion was tacky, and developed immediately before the salts dried and crystalized on the glass. This cumbersome, somewhat complicated, and precise process had to take place within a span of ten minutes, or the emulsion would lose its sensitivity. Such a limitation meant, of course, that the photographer of Carter's day had to take his darkroom, chemicals, plates, and all of the rest of his equipment with him on every picture-taking excursion.30 Added to this were the difficulties and complications of changing weather and dust and chemical contamination, any one of which could spoil the plate. In spite of these obstacles, wet-plate photography held sway for nearly twenty-five years. Those who practiced the art—like Carter—did an unbelievably thorough job of photo-documenting the western frontier.

Thanks to Carter, many of Marsena Cannon's daguerreotypes, as well as several taken by Foster, survive to this day. Carter photo-copied every interesting picture that came his way and filed the negatives for future use. A portion of them can be found in the C.W. Carter Collection maintained by the Mormon Church. Early views of the Beehive House, Main Street, and other pioneer buildings and scenes in this collection obviously pre-date Carter's arrival in Utah.

Almost immediately upon going into business in Utah, Carter was successful. His technique captured the imagination of the settlers, and his services over the years were always in demand. Among Carter's early customers was Brigham Young, who divided his business between Carter and another English photographer named C. R. Savage.

Carter loved to photograph Indians, and his wry sense of humor is illustrated in a notebook entry made shortly after photographing "Pahute Jim and his squaw":

I expect that this is the first time that the loving Jim ever had his arm around the neck of his lady love. As a general thing the Indians are not very loving, as the squaws have to do all the hard work and the braves are too high bred to carry bundles through the streets, they are "heap big Indians." But I got Jim to sit for his "pigter" as they call it. He looked so amiable sitting by the side of his spouse, that I could not resist the inclination of putting his arm around her neck. The picture was taken before he was aware he looked so loving.

Carter also had a good sense of the historic and photojournalistic. In addition to the portraits of leading notables of Salt Lake City, he photographed a wide variety of landscapes, city scenes, and significant historic events. For example, in 1872, when Brigham Young appeared in court on a charge of "lewd and lascivious cohabitation," Carter focused his camera on a large crowd gathered outside Judge James B. McKean's courtroom. The photograph has since been generally captioned as "a crowd scene in Salt Lake City," but in Carter's own caption book it has been labeled "Brigham Young's Trial."

Carter also outfitted a darkroom wagon and traveled throughout Utah Territory, photographing geographic points of interest. Once, he met a wagon train of Mormons coming down Echo Canyon and captured some memorable views of the immigrants slowly making their way through some beaver ponds that blocked the canyon trail.

Among the photographer's surviving pictures are a vivid portrait of Ann Eliza Webb Young, the unruly wife of Brigham Young who sued him for divorce in 1873, a series of views of the federal troops at Camp Douglas, and remarkably clear views of Salt Lake City and its surroundings in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, as well as progressive views of the Salt Lake Temple and Tabernacle under construction, from the earliest stages of foundation to dedication. Carter continued his photographic trade through the 1880s and 1890s amid growing competition. As his life waned he opened a stand just outside Temple Square where he sold pictures to tourists.

Carter outlived his chief competitor and old employer, C. R. Savage, by nearly nine years. But on March 13, 1906, too old to take any more pictures and too feeble to peddle prints and postcards from his stand, the Englishman sold his entire negative collection to the Bureau of Information on Temple Square. According to the bill of sale, the collection then consisted of fifteen hundred to two thousand negatives "more or less and contained in 21 boxes." In the same transaction, the pioneer photographer sold "all photographs and views . . . and all other accessories and appurtenances," including copyrights and all other materials connected with his photographic work at his residence, 2 Church Street. The photographer attached a notebook which he marked "Exhibit A" to the bill of sale. It contains a partial list of his negative collection. In return for the negatives and equipment, the Bureau of Information gave $25 to Carter on the tenth day of every month until the sum of $400 was paid. The bill of sale was signed by Benjamin Goddard for the Bureau of Information and witnessed by Jacob F. Gates.

The photographer lived for another twelve years after the sale. Then during the night of January 27, 1918, while staying at the home of a daughter, Mrs. George Smith, in Midvale, Utah, Charles William Carter had a heart attack and died. He was eighty-five.

Carter's extensive negative collection was used for a number of years in making prints, uncredited, for the Temple Square Bureau of Information. Eventually, after being filed away in boxes in the basement of the museum, it was forgotten. In 1963, museum curator Carl Jones began taking inventory of the museum's holdings and discovered a [p.46] wooden box containing three hundred of Carter's negatives under a pile of dust and junk in the basement. The collection is now held by the Mormon Church's Information Service in its own negative file at Panorama Productions, a commercial studio in Salt Lake City that does photographic work for the church. Much of the collection probably a large share of the individual portraits—has been lost over the years, but many of the valuable historical pictures have been preserved, including the controversial "photograph" of Joseph Smith.