Carolyn Drake Bio
Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and creatively reimagine them. Her practice embraces collaboration and has in recent years melded photography with sewing, collage, and sculpture. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries.
Drake was born in California and studied Media/Culture and History in the early 1990s at Brown University. Following her graduation from Brown in 1994, Drake moved to New York and worked as a interactive designer for many years before departing to engage with the physical world through photography at the age of 30.
Between 2007 and 2013, Drake lived in Istanbul while working on two long term projects. Two Rivers (self-published, 2013) lyrically explores the connections between ecology, culture and political power along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers in post-Soviet Central Asia and earned a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. Wild Pigeon (self-published, 2014) is an amalgam of photographs, drawings, and embroideries made in collaboration with Uyghurs in western China before the government’s most extreme indoctrination and mass detention policies took effect. This work earned the Lange-Taylor prize and the Anamorphosis book prize, and was presented in a six-month solo exhibition at SFMOMA in 2018. For Internat (self-published, 2017), Drake returned to Ukraine, where she had lived on a 2006 Fulbright fellowship, to work with young women sequestered in an ex-Soviet orphanage on photographs and paintings that point beyond the walls of the institution and its gender rules. Internat was awarded the 2018 Houston Center for Photography fellowship curated by Charlotte Cotton and later exhibited in several festivals in Europe.
In 2014, Drake returned to the United States, where she has spent the last decade focusing on more self-reflective projects “close to home.” Knit Club (TBW Books, 2020) emerged from her collaboration with an unexpectedly enigmatic group of sewing friends she met while living in Water Valley, Mississippi. It was shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture Book of the Year and Lucie Photo Book Awards and exhibited at McEvoy Foundation in San Francisco, Yancey Richardson Gallery, and ICP in New York.
Drakes Covid photo sculptures made in her back yard over the span of a year in 2020 were exhibited in 2021 at SFMOMA’s Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis show and in 2022 at Yancey Richardson Gallery. In 2021, in response to her ongoing Next Door work in California, she was commissioned to create a quilt for the show American Epidemic: Guns in the United States at the Museum of Contemporary photography in Chicago.
Drakes Henri Cartier Bresson award exhibition, Men Untitled, was launched alongside a publication (TBW 2023) and was followed by exhibitions of Glorify Yourself at Yancey Richardson Gallery and during Arles with Fuji/Magnum Photos. Her latest publication, Ill let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours (Mack 2024), is a collaboration with her longtime partner Andres Gonzalez in Mexico/US border towns.
Drake’s work has received additional support from the Peter S Reed Foundation grant, a Lightwork fellowship, the Do Good Fund, and the Pulitzer Center. She is represented by Magnum Photos and Yancey Richardson Gallery and is currently based in Vallejo, California.