Carolyn Drake

From carolyndrake.com
Carolyn Drake studied Media/Culture and American History in the 1990s at Brown University, where she became interested in documentary, and the ways that history and reality are shaped, revised, and re-imagined over time. After graduating, she worked for publishing companies in New York for many years, but eventually left her office job to engage with the world through photography. She studied at ICP and entered the grad program at Ohio University, returning to New York frequently to work on a project about the Lubavitchers, a closed community of ultra orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, where she had lived for eight years. The photo essay won the Community Awareness Award at POYi. In 2006, she moved to Ukraine, where she created photo stories along the perimeter of the country while studying Russian. Since 2007, Carolyn has been pursuing two photography projects in Central Asia. The first – Two Rivers – explores the shifting borders, histories, and life systems in the geographic spaces between Aghanistan, Iran, Russia, and China. The book, self published in June 2013, is a collaboration with writer Elif Batuman and designer Sybren Kuiper. The second project, still ongoing, is a collage of photos, sketches, and texts about Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China. The work explores the boundaries of photography while telling the story of a culture being disrupted and reshaped. Carolyn is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, the Lange Taylor Documentary Prize, a World Press Photo award, and was a finalist for the Santa Fe Prize. She has exhibited at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, the Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff, Somerset House in London, and the New York Photo Festival, among other venues.