Photobooks as Intervention with B. Carrie-Yvonne

Photobooks as Intervention is a four-week tactile meditation that examines how communal practices, value systems, and material needs contribute to visual narratives of Black life. With an emphasis on photographers based in the American South, we will conduct close readings of four contemporary photobooks that chronicle Black image production:

• Louisiana Medley by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick (2018)
• A Civil Rights Journey by Doris Derby (2021)
• Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive edited by Nicole R. Fleetwood and Brian Wallis (2026)
• Close Friends by Arieanne Evans (2026)

These artists understand that the camera is a memory work tool--a device that subverts commercial imagination.

This workshop invites learners to write about the cultural significance of the Black Southern photographic canon and to reflect on whose creative labor is present in photobook publishing. Along the way, participants will apply visual literacy skills to discuss placemaking within a historical context, interrogate the work of photographers with roots in the American South, explore how lived experience shapes personal documentation style, and gain interest in collecting photobooks.

Beginning Saturday, June 6th, this class will meet weekly from 3 - 4:30 PM, for four weeks at Atlanta Center for Photography.

Instructor Bio:

B Carrie-Yvonne (b.1997) is a multimedia artist, film photographer, archivist, and memory worker. Their practice utilizes storytelling as a form of Black feminist worldmaking which informs their approach to image-making. This act of study allows them to reconstruct personal, and found archival memories particularly in collages.

Carrie-Yvonne believes their practice to be an ongoing investigation of the relationship between art and belonging. Their creative labor is the result of displacement, grief, and matrilineal care, leaving us to ask, how can materiality gesture us towards an alternative knowing? Their collage work will be showcased in the upcoming issue of Photo Trouveé, and film photography was recently featured in The Atlanta Center for Photography’s annual publication, New South, Volume II: Double Vision.

In 2024, Carrie-Yvonne was selected to participate in the Southern Memory Workers’ Institute at The Highlander Research & Education Center. Since then they have taken an interest in printed matter such as zines and photobooks.