Megan and Hazel Sue at Creekmore House
2018 - Photography (Photography)
37.5 x 50 inches
Carolyn Drake
Megan and Hazel Sue at Creekmore House by Carolyn Drake is from a series of works titled Knit Club . For this project, Drake collaborated with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi who loosely call themselves “Knit Club”. The subject matter of this photograph centers on the relationship between the girl and doll in the painting, and the woman and girl in the photograph. There are many echoes that occur between the painting and the photograph, for instance, the blue dress of the doll matches the blue sleeves of the girl hiding behind her mother’s legs. It’s an image of a woman, holding a girl, holding a woman, and a girl holding a woman. These layers of history, representation, and spaces-within-spaces create a specific mood about the work. One that is mysterious, concealing, a little eerie, but also innocent. Drake explains: “The woman holding the framed picture (by Joseph Whiting Stock) is Megan Patton. The child hugging her legs is her adopted daughter Hazel Sue. We borrowed the picture from a wall in Megan’s house for the shoot. That’s how the shoot worked: finding props, taking them to one of the empty old Gothic houses around the town, and mixing and rearranging them there. It was a communal, collaborative process. Usually a couple women would be there to assist while other women stepped in front of the camera.”
Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects that involve travel and collaboration. In her most recent project, Knit Club , she’s returned to a style of working that involves actively collaborating with her subjects on co-producing objects and selecting props that become involved in the staging of photographs. This way of working emerged after her time as a photojournalist in foreign countries, and seeing the complicated and often problematic divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary. Drake is one of only a handful of women photographers working in contemporary art today. 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) explores the connections between ecology, culture and political power along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers; and Wild Pigeon (2014) is an amalgam of photographs, drawings, and embroideries made in collaboration with Uyghurs in western China. In another project, Internat (2014-2017), Drake worked with young women in an ex-Soviet orphanage in the Ukraine to create photographs and paintings that point beyond the walls of the institution and its gender expectations. Her most recent body of work is Knit Club , which emerged through her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi loosely calling themselves “Knit Club” and is currently shortlisted for the Photo Book of the Year Award with Aperture/Paris Photo.
