Transcendental Concord

Lisa McCarty is a photographer, filmmaker, and curator based in Durham North Carolina. Lisa has participated in over 50 exhibitions at venues such as The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Chicago Photography Center, Houston Center for Photography, Griffin Museum of Photography, Asheville Art Museum, and the American University Museum. Lisa's photographs have also been shown internationally in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Argentina. Lisa holds an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University and is currently Curator of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University's Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library as well as an instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Transcendental Concord is a project to seek out and document the spirit of Transcendentalism, the literary, mystical, and philosophical movement that arose from Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century. This daily communion with Nature, neighbors, and one's own mind is at the heart of the Transcendental ethos. For Transcendentalism was not simply a new approach to writing about the world, but a new approach to living and being present in it. As Emerson himself stated, "The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connexion of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration and in ecstasy."