All photos © Carolyn Drake

Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and creatively reimagine them. Her practice embraces collaboration and combines 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.

Between 2007 and 2013, Drake traveled frequently to Central Asia from her base in Istanbul to work on two long term projects: Two Rivers (2013) and Wild Pigeon (2014). The latter work was acquired by the SFMOMA in San Francisco and presented at a six-month solo exhibition in 2018. In Internat (2014-2017), Drake worked with young women in an ex-Soviet orphanage to create photographs and paintings. This work was followed by (TBW Books, 2020), which emerged from her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi loosely calling themselves Knit Club and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture Book of the Year and Lucie Photo Book Awards. Her latest project Men Untitled (TBW Books, 2023) was awarded the 2021 HCB Award by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Carolyn Drake’s work has been supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, the Anamorphosis Prize book prize, Peter S Reed Foundation, Lightwork, the Do Good Fund, the Lange Taylor prize, Magnum Foundation, Pulitzer Center, and a Fulbright fellowship. She is a member of Magnum Photos and is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York. Carolyn Drake is a PhotoAlliance 2018 lecturer.

Published by TBW Books, Men Untitled by Carolyn Drake is a new series of photographs exploring her relationship to myths of masculinity in American culture. The subjects in Men Untitled appear nude or half-dressed, frozen in awkward poses, torsos twisted and bent, backward facing, wearing furniture, and even hung upside down. But they also appear to be at ease with—possibly even acting in collusion with—the artist.

Carolyn Drake was awarded the 2021 HCB Award by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson to produce this series of photographs. A limited number of books will be available at the event.

Men United by Carolyn Drake
Published by TBW Books, 2023
Flexi soft cover with embossed tip-on, 118 pages, 33 color / 23 duotone plates
In English and French
ISBN 978-19-42953-60-9

All photos © Ebti

Ebti is a multidisciplinary artist, a self-taught photographer and a translator living between Cairo and San Francisco. Ebti comes from a background of linguistics, translation, and intercultural communication, and is interested in topics surrounding how language shapes the way we see and interprets ideas such as storytelling, belonging, and attachment. She has a BA in German studies from Cairo University, Egypt, an MA in translation and intercultural studies from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany and an MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA.

Shedid’s solo exhibition, ABLA, will be on view this spring at SF Camerawork at Fort Mason.

Make it an afternoon and explore what Ft Mason Center for the Arts has to offer! Our thanks to Bayfront Theater administered by BATS Improv for hosting us in their space.

Drinking and Dining at Fort Mason Center: 
The Interval (bar w/ snacks)
Greens (upscale vegetarian)
RadHaus (German beer and food)
Off the Grid (food truck festival)

Nearby:
Delarosa (roman-style pizzeria)
Patxi’s Chicago Pizza (pizza)
Plant (organic vegetarian)
Tacolicious (untraditional taqueria)
The Tipsy Pig (gastropub)

Explore all the great restaurants on Chestnut Street