By VALARIE SCHWARTZ
Chapel Hill News
August 26, 2004

Every Monday since May 2003, Catharine Carter has maintained the same early-morning routine.

Wearing protective clothing and sensible shoes, she heads over to Memorial Hall on the UNC campus with her camera and tripod to continue her project of capturing the evolution of the once-great hall in stunning black-and-white images.

She started the project after the last performance at the hall in May 2002. Construction was held up for a year, but after it began in earnest more than a year ago, she dedicated an hour every Monday to it.

The results have been dramatic.

One photo shows a bulldozer chugging over mounds of dirt below the impressive massive windows that, since 1931, visitors to the hall have sat below during performances. Another shows the stark frame of the stage, which harbored performers and provided a home base for the North Carolina Symphony, looking almost like a dinosaur skeleton between the windowed side walls.

"I tell myself I will shoot only one roll, which is 10 shots, then I shoot three rolls," Carter said. After returning home, she selects shots and blows them up to 11-by-14-inch prints that she mats. She has created quite a collection - a collection with no known destiny.

"I don't know what the plan is," Carter said.

To Carter, a professional photographer who has Mondays off, it felt right to make documenting the transformation of the building a part of her Monday routine. After all, Memorial Hall was a frequent destination for her and her siblings as they grew up. Her father, Joel Carter, was professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1949 until his retirement in 1978. He taught voice and opera, and he performed as well. The Carter family, including her mother, Eleanor, enjoyed many performances in the great hall.

"It captured my imagination," Carter said of the renovation. "Dad passed away in 2000. I had seen him perform on that stage and had seen many things on that stage and wanted to be a part of the process of seeing it transformed."

"I can remember so many times as a little girl cramming into the corners of the dressing rooms backstage."

In recent years, she has spent hours in the hall shooting pictures of the ballerinas of the Triangle Youth Ballet, for which she is the official photographer.

Never, in her previous years of visiting the hall, has she been required to pick up a hard hat before entering the doors.

These days, stepping into the hall with its bare concrete exposed on all sides is a far cry from the Memorial Hall of bygone days.

"It has an underworld feel," Carter said.

On Monday, the main floor of the auditorium was filled with scaffolding under the great dome.

That's a far different scene from the portraits she does of children in their homes or in the studio and gardens at her home on Ransom Street.

"I love secret gardens," she said during a tour of her back yard. The grounds flow from one setting of flora and fauna to another, each with places where children can pose surrounded by foliage. Inside the studio, the choice of props and backgrounds provides many options for mood and tone that a client may wish to evoke in a child's portrait.

This year marks 30 years for Carter as a professional photographer. As with the work at Memorial Hall, Carter flexes her artistic muscles beyond studio work, most recently during a trip to Costa Rica that resulted in a show at that country's embassy in Washington, D.C., last year.

She went to Costa Rica with her mentor, renowned photographer Jay Stock of Martins Ferry, Ohio.

"He's taken students all over the world," she said. "This was my first opportunity to go with him. He's the kind of man who, if something isn't happening, he makes it happen."

They traveled the countryside and, when the setting, light and magic were right, they stopped.

"He'd get out and talk to people," she said.

The results were photographs of Costa Ricans plowing a field, traveling to market with a new-born calf, weaving baskets; or tons of fruit at market and shots of cloud-enshrouded mountains or impressive architecture. The experience drove home for Carter the need to document.

"Documentaries are so important in this world of fakery and make believe," she said. "The people were wonderful." Carter said that, though the people didn't have much by American standards, they were "so proud of what they did have."

Work on Memorial Hall is expected to be completed sometime in 2005. Without doubt, Carter will continue her Monday morning pilgrimages and somewhere, someday, after the new hall replete with six as opposed to two restrooms (25 stalls for women), her photographs will document the Memorial Hall that was, and Carter can continue her work there - without the hard hat.

Contact Valarie Schwartz at 932-2011 or vschwart@nando.com