Location: Vallejo, CA
Medium: Photography, collage, photo books
Website: carolyndrake.com
Carolyn Drake was born in 1971 in California and studied Media/Culture and History at Brown University, graduating in 1994. She worked as an interactive designer in New York for many years before departing to engage with the physical world through photography at age thirty. In 2006 she moved to Ukraine on a Fulbright fellowship, and from 2007 to 2013 was based in Istanbul while undertaking two major long-term projects in Central Asia and western China. She returned to the United States in 2014, living in Mississippi and Georgia before settling in Vallejo, California in 2016, drawn by what she has described as the city's eclectic diversity and its resemblance to an older California from before the tech boom.
She is a full member of Magnum Photos (since 2019) and is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (2021), the Lange-Taylor Prize, the World Press Photo Award, the Anamorphosis Book Prize, an HCP Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and support from the Peter S. Reed Foundation, Magnum Foundation, and Pulitzer Center. Her work is in the permanent collection of SFMOMA (twenty-seven prints as of 2023) and the Library of Congress. She has published five books, most recently Men Untitled (TBW Books, 2023).
Drake works on long-term, deeply collaborative photo-based projects that seek to interrogate dominant historical narratives and imaginatively reconstruct them. Her practice has evolved from documentary-style fieldwork in Central Asia, Ukraine, and China — often involving sustained immersion in communities over years — into more self-reflective work closer to home, in Vallejo and the American South. Collaboration is central to her method: rather than photographing communities as subjects, she works with and alongside them, integrating sewing, collage, embroidery, and drawing made by her subjects into the photographic work. She has described her work as driven by a personal feeling of disconnection — an outsider's desire to find connection — and her photographs carry that tension: intimate yet searching, warm yet questioning. Her Vallejo project, begun on arrival in 2016, examines community, safety, gender, and surveillance in one of the Bay Area's most overlooked cities.
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