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Carolyn Drake (born 1971) is an American photographer based in Vallejo, California. She works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and imagine alternatives to them. Her work explores community and the interactions within it, as well as the barriers and connections between people, between places and between ways of perceiving. her practice has embraced collaboration, and through this, collage, drawing, sewing, text, and found images have been integrated into her work. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries.
Drake's extensive work among people in Central Asia, and Xinjiang in China, is presented in two self-published books, Two Rivers and Wild Pigeon. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented a solo exhibition of the latter and acquired the collection of original works from the project in 2018.
Drake is a member of Magnum Photos. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,[1] the Lange-Taylor Prize,[2] the Anamorphosis photo book prize, a Fulbright fellowship, a World Press Photo award[3] and the HCB Award.[4] Her work is held in the collections of the U.S. Library of Congress and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Her exhibition Men Untitled is on at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris, until January 14, 2024.
Drake was born in California. She studied Media/Culture and History in the early 1990s at Brown University.[5] She had a "multimedia job in New York's Silicon Alley" until starting as a photographer at the age of 30.[6]
In 2006 she moved to Ukraine and in 2007 to Istanbul, Turkey, until 2013.[7] Whilst based in Istanbul she made two long term projects, one in the central Asian countries that were part of the Soviet Union, Two Rivers, and one on the Chinese side of central Asia, Wild Pigeon.
Partly funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Drake made fifteen journeys over five years[8] travelling and photographing in the once vibrant region of central Asia that lies between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers that once nourished it.[9] The region, encompassing Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, was transformed when the rivers were diverted for cotton irrigation by the former Soviet Union. Drake's resulting self-published book, Two Rivers (2013), was financed via Kickstarter;[10][11] it was well received by Sean O'Hagan.[12] For Jeffrey Ladd, the book's design (by Sybren Kuiper), notably the way some photographs on recto pages have their right edges on the verso, detracted from it.[13]
She spent seven years visiting Xinjiang in western China (officially called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region), photographing the Uyghur people for her self-published book Wild Pigeon (2014).[14] There is discord between the Chinese authorities and the indigenous ethnic Uyghur population. Sean O'Hagan wrote about Wild Pigeon that "Drake is a master of atmosphere";[15] and by Martin Parr;[16] Colin Pantall;[17] Blake Andrews;[18] and Ian Denis Johnson, who wrote "this book does what a great social novel does: it forces us to think of a contested region not in terms of op-eds or political analyses, but as seen by people in daily life".[19] For Jeffrey Ladd, the design of the book (again by Sybren Kuiper) avoided the excesses of that of Two Rivers, and "The results of the collages [by the people Drake photographed] are unexpectedly rich and create the sense of a place that is both [ordinary] with daily routine and imbued with the fantastic that is accented by Drake's own perceptions: young teenagers dance under a burst of colored light; a classroom that seems to take on surreal drama; a dog fight; skeletal remains hanging in a butcher shop."[13]
In 2013 Drake and her partner, photographer Andres Gonzalez, moved from Istanbul to the United States to begin a new body of work, and moved to Water Valley, Mississippi,[20][21][5] then in 2015 to Athens, Georgia, and finally to Vallejo, California in 2016.
In 2015 she became a nominee member of Magnum Photos,[22][23] in 2017 an associate member,[24] and in 2019 a full member.[25]
Drake's work is held in the following public collections:
