REIGN

A native of Durham, North Carolina, Kennedi Carter has become a leading voice in contemporary photography with her photos gracing the covers of top publications like British Vogue, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. Her portraiture captures the beauty, resilience, and complexity of Black life. Carter spoke with FORM about projects past and present as well as her experience as a young photographer in the industry.

Caroline Rettig: What led you to pursue photography? And, more specifically, what inspired your artistic focus on Black life?

Kennedi Carter: I started my photo work there, and then I decided I wanted to go to UNCG. I ended up leaving there and pursuing freelance work. I think what really ended up drawing me to photograph Black sitters in particular is… I don’t know. I think when I was making work in North Carolina, I was becoming super bored with what was in front of me. While I was getting bored, I don’t think I realized the beauty that was in front of me and in my community. When I started reaching out to various people I was in community with, that’s when I realized what I wanted the primary focus of my process to be or who I wanted it to focus on in particular.

CR: How does living in Durham, North Carolina shape your photography?

KC: It’s just super quiet here, and it gives me more space to think. Working with folks that I had gone to high school with... asking them and their families five years post-graduation or reconnecting with someone that I once knew from high school that could then connect me to a person that I could probably photograph. I think that’s what Durham and North Carolina does; it keeps me grounded, and it keeps me searching for new people to photograph or to find new people that I think are interesting.

JM: Would you say that staying grounded in Durham, North Carolina has been a personal journey for you, in addition to being an artistic one?

KC: I definitely think so. My family is quite small, and I think about them, as well. They’re based in Texas, and the portion of my family that is from Philadelphia, we’re not that close. I think that since my family is so spread out, finding a community of my own and consistently following-up with them, taking their picture, documenting them, archiving them has been very helpful in creating a newfound family of my own.

CR: You have been incredibly successful in both commercial and fine arts photography. Do you foresee yourself continuing to photograph both types?

KC: I think I more so see myself doing fine arts photography in the future and more than likely teaching later on. In regard to editorial, I am likely going to pump the breaks on that within the next three years. I have been doing it primarily for about two years now, and it has become difficult to create a thought of my own without comments from the peanut gallery in the back. When it came time to shoot my personal work, I didn’t have the cacophony of people telling me, “Maybe you should try this, or maybe you should try this.” It was all on me again, and it was becoming super difficult.

I didn’t know and still feel as though I don’t know how to really trust my own intuition anymore. I think in order to get back to a place that I need to be in order to do my fine artwork, which is what I want to do full-time, I am more than likely going to have to take a step back from editorial.

I think in fine art, you have more room to trust your intuition, because that is what’s expected of you. But, when it comes to editorial, commercial, advertising, you got people you have to please to get paid.

JM: Have you experienced community amongst photographers? If so, how has that helped you along the way?

KC:: I think especially in the most recent years, there has just been a renaissance of Black photographers or Black photography in general. With that comes a great sense of kinship or community or just being in solidarity with someone. I think also with that, you have so many questions that you are able to turn towards your neighbor and ask, which is super helpful. I think especially because when it comes to how much you’re getting paid or advocating for yourself and how much you think you should get paid, it’s helpful to have these people that are going through everything that you’re going through at the same time. In order to get advice whether it’s like working with the clients and getting an idea as to how much you can charge for that or… when you’re selling edition prints, how to sell edition prints, could you connect me to this curator, could you connect me to this editor. For the most part, most of the photographers that I am friends with these days have been willing to help me with this information, or they ask me questions and I give them answers. It’s been very helpful, and I think it’s one of the reasons why I have been able to have the career that I am having.

CR: For your personal fine arts projects, how would you describe your artistic process?

KC: I feel like it’s constantly evolving. Usually, something just piques my interest, and I am like, “Okay, I would like to know a bit more about this thing.” I feel like it usually starts off with a wormhole… and being like, “Oh wow. This is a really great subject matter, or this isn’t something that has been documented enough. How can I fill in the gaps?”

I think that’s where my artistic process starts, and then I think over the course of time, I just keep trying to expand on it and try different things or use different materials, such as maybe I shoot analog, I shoot digital, or I do a cyanotype print or mixed-media project. I’m trying not to keep myself boxed into one particular space these days.

CR: More specifically, with your project Ridin’ Sucka Free, how did you develop that concept?

KC: My mom’s side of the family is from Texas. When I was younger, we would go down the freeway, and there would be people on horseback going down the freeway. I just thought that was super interesting, because dude, we have cars. I think I started reading Beverly Jenkins novels, and she’s in quotations corny but I don’t think she’s corny. She’s a romance novelist, and she would create these vivid scenes of 1800’s Black horseback riders. I was like, “I really think that I could probably do a project on this.” About three years ago, I had gone to Houston for a family event, and there was a trail ride happening that weekend, so I decided I was going to go to one, and I just started going around taking photos of people. And, I just started consistently going to trail rides, sometimes going to different ones, sometimes going to the same ones, as well as reaching out to Black equestrians in North Carolina and in Durham. Everywhere I would go… I would try to find at least one if I could. That’s how the project was born. Lydia Sellers: How did you first gain exposure for your photography? How did you outsource your work and get into the public eye?

KC: I was mainly posting on Instagram, but that could only really take me so far. I knew that I wanted to get my work in front of editors, so what I did was I started submitting images to PhotoVogue, which is an online photography platform that is curated by Vogue Italia. After that, they put some of my images in their photo festival they do every year out in Milan. That is when I started getting a lot of eyes on my work. I also would go to portfolio reviews every now and then, and I would just consistently follow-up with people and that was very helpful. One of my good friends who is a photographer, Dana Scruggs, she was telling me that you just have to reach out to editors and that you just have to be consistent with them, especially because they’re busy. That was very helpful advice. I felt like my work increased significantly when I was reaching out and just marketing myself, because I didn’t have anyone else to do it at the time. I didn’t have an agent or PR or anything. That’s pretty much how I got started. Another thing I would do was I would go underneath the posts of different photographers that I admired and if they posted an editorial or something they did that was a commission and they tagged the editor they worked with, so I would then follow the editor. That would be another way of me finding a point of contact for a certain magazine. I would also go to the magazine’s website and go find their letterhead or use this website called Rocket Reach, which is super sketchy, but I somehow ended up finessing and finding the emails of various editors.

JM: What is it like now to be in a position where you have this well-established career and can now help the next generation?

KC: I feel like it’s successful in theory, but I feel like I still have more stuff to do, to be honest, especially because after the birth of my son, a lot of my work just fell off. I took a six-month maternity leave, and I just wasn’t reaching out to people as consistently as I was before, because I simply didn’t have the energy to do so, and I was rethinking a lot when it came to my relationship with the editorial world. Now, I am like, “Okay, what does success look like for me in regard to the fine art world,” and I am still figuring that out. I think, if anything, how I try to pay things forward is by always being willing to answer questions, because I remember, a few years prior to when I was super serious, whenever I would try to ask questions, there was a period of no one responding. I think that is the best thing someone can do is just not gatekeeping information.

Poem Written In Last Years Room Reflected

Would-be what-if, what if. . . We wanted it back, big promise, portent, apocalypse, urgency, plummet, plunge”

― Nathaniel Mackey

“And if an essential thing has flown between us, rare intellectual bird of communication, let us seize it quickly;”

― Muriel Rukeyser

Being with you on the worst of days — still choosing my words uncarefully— not tanning in the sun, just sleeping. Just speaking, just sweat, clutching of one moment, no matter how long it lasts. Suffering insistence. Sweeping the leg loudly. You know I want to fuck her before I tell you, you keep this to yourself. You do this; you do that— hung hug and a half moment of hatred we’ve forgotten about. Mixed Emotions. Emitted motions .

“Don’t rile up the dog” but squeak your shoe soulfully. Full stop. A dragon cannot fly over this mountain. But, it can wrap its wings around the tip, including the creatures that lie atop. A new biome— a bright 30-mile crater, for all foot-travelers and clusters of theaters on wheels, their brakes broken for decades.

bubbles of stone, rigid, wiggle out from below sound of a sound of a bark of a dog. things trickle thru salt and lime you had a high voice that worked happy happenings thru all-being like a shiver. quiet in the house, the imprint was more audible as a negative wave. Us a shriek in choral mode. polygon of love opening pleasure of doing business with you fancy of seeing you here lightning on the water brightness gone and naught but live ripples were one to feel them. as it does the world shifts we bite into new selves like teeth

Ducked thru in the slow-quick gap where distant eyes catch. Naturally, we wake up in another world dreamed each morning in the cold auras of rosywinged dawn. Or what we can have agency in. Enjamb each flashback into the other one. Invisible farce we walk in; all riddles to art, if thought can hit a nerve cluster. Stirred fluster. Who sleeps in this caldera?

How many Jokes can we make about kissing nuns? or about polyamorous nuns loving economics? Who’s to say at this point we lay down at the foot of the tub and ask ourselves to shout curse words until we feel it at the base of our heels and the tip of our big toe.

I happen to think that keeps us human & this whole thing healthy. How tangy is the honey? How tart the summer okra? If I could write a whole book of epigraphs: guess; Yesterday, Maia reminded me we used to kiss, but it didn’t have the effect she wanted. It zigged and zagged up and down to the stairs of the house, shrieking in staccato, in discordant tones, no less beautiful than ever before. It reminded me that I need a new bookshelf, dark wood is preferred.

“What, in other words, is possible in the infinity, if indeed it is an infinity, between one and two?”

― Olivia Michiko Gagnon, “The Between”

What is viscous and vicious enough to bring us here? What has passed between you and I, I want to ask, knowing there’s no correct answer. Dungeons and dragons failed, but the scarf stand still stands. Galaxy brain leviathan, or swimming round those murky synapses. A world that loves back in some awful way. Now and when— a thick sea seething. My memory of that first walk rose like a cinnamon stick in one of Jolie’s soups— almost forgotten but not quite gone. Like, how when you focus on the white of a goose it’s like there was never black. Hopepunk once you realize it was always just in your peripheral. Serenity of an old shock. Jolie strutting pompous circumstance / in some always elsewhere. Reflection on an echo, but we’re all that ever was/is though.

WRITING Becca Schneid & Dylan Haston