J Carrier (b. Biloxi, Mississippi) After spending nearly a decade living and working in Africa and the Middle East, a five-year stint in Brooklyn, a return to Israel/Palestine in 2018, and back to Washington DC where he grew up, J now happily resides in central Vermont with his wife and kids. J has a BS in
Wildlife & Fisheries science and
Forestry from The Pennsylvania State University (1996) and an MFA from the Hartford Art School (2012) and is an assistant professor at George Mason University. He formerly taught at Cornell University, the International Center of Photography (NYC), and Western Connecticut State University. His first monograph,
Elementary Calculus, was published by MACK in September 2012, and selected for numerous year end “best of” lists. It was also included in the
2013 International Center of Photography Triennial. J has also published three books with TIS –
Untitled 1 (Vermont, 2014),
Untitled 2 (Vermont, 2016) – and most recently,
The Folly (2021). Work from J’s recent projects,
Mi´raj &
In Circles is currently in design & production and will be published in the coming year.
J Carrier’s artistic practice is born out of a desire to acquire, to compose, to order, to solve. Making photographs for J is an active engagement with life, and a spiritual quest for the reveal – what the artist Robert Irwin described as
presence. J uses photography as a form of language, in a process akin to the Greek idea of
poeisis, or making, leveraging the medium’s ambiguity to provoke questions about what and how we see and how photographs serve as raw material to build complex and multifaceted forms. Working in the
documentary mode, J believes photographs have the capacity to reflect our complicated existence and – rather than simplifying or essentializing – allow for diverse and divergent lines of dialogue to co-exist. As such, the extended photographic series hold an important place in J’s work. This form mirrors the iterative, cumulative and recursive approach he uses to navigate the world (walking and retracing) and make pictures.