Born in 1971 in California, is an American photographer living in Vallejo, California. She works primarily on long-term projects that question established historical narratives and propose alternative ways of seeing, focusing on communities, interpersonal relationships, and the boundaries between people, places, and modes of perception. Her practice seeks to unsettle distinctions between author and subject, and between the real and the imagined.

Her extensive work in Central Asia and the Xinjiang region of China is presented in two self-published photobooks, Two Rivers (2013) and Wild Pigeon (2014). These projects were developed over many years and are based on repeated travel and long-term engagement with the regions and their inhabitants. Wild Pigeon was the subject of a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which also acquired the complete body of original works from the project in 2018.

She studied media/cultural studies and history at Brown University in the early 1990s and began working in photography at the age of 30. After living in Ukraine and later in Istanbul, she carried out her Central Asia and Xinjiang projects before relocating to the United States in 2013. She became a full member of Magnum Photos in 2019. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lange-Taylor Prize, the Anamorphosis Photobook Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a World Press Photo Award. Her work is held in the collection of the Library of Congress.

Reference:
Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition. Retrieved January 19, 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Drake