This feature is part of CULTURED‘s 2026 Young Photographers list. This year’s list spotlights 14 artists aged 30 or younger from around the globe who are united by a relentless curiosity and an understanding that the photographer’s most important job is identifying what deserves to be seen.
AGE:29
BASED IN: Nashville
In the Yale graduate’s hazy stills, the textures of familial relationships, community ties, and hometown bonds come to the fore. The artist’s poetry practice, recently published in The Bitter Southerner, has only heightened the emotional stakes of her visual work.
What questions does your work ask?
How do we grieve? Or, how do we refuse to perform feminine ideals? How does interiority function in relation to the human psyche?
What fears does your work address?
I hope that my images assuage the voices that tell us to fear being secure in our softness. Softness shouldn’t be seen as a moral failing, and our ability to feel and empathize is just as necessary as presenting cold, concrete facts.
Who are your visual influences?
Queen Carrie Mae Weems. I highly doubt I’m alone in this, but I won’t ever forget sitting in my first photo class, hoping to see at least one Black woman photographer in my instructor’s Intro to Photo History lectures and being met with the warmth and familiarity in Untitled (woman and daughter with makeup), 1990.
What do you want to see more of in photography today? Less of?
I want to see less paying homage. I want to see more risks taken. I want artists to be honest with themselves about why they make what they make and who they make it for.
What ingredients do you always look for in an image?
A distinct color palette. Deana Lawson’s Young Grandmother, 2019, is my favorite use of color in a photograph. I think compositions that take risks and make mistakes—because they know how to break the rules—are refreshing. Texture is another element I find satisfying because I feel like surfaces are sort of paradoxical—they inform the sense of interior and a space, while simultaneously, we know nothing about these people in these rooms, these portraits. We need that dichotomy as humans.
Meet more of CULTURED‘s 2026 Young Photographers:
Photographer Elijah Chukwuka Mogoli Captures a Disappearing Brooklyn
Photographer Alec Dai Once Shot a Series Naked, in a Basement, Under a ‘Weird Portrait of Jesus’
Many Photographers Have Been Nominated for a Pulitzer. This One Was Nominated for a Grammy.
For Queer Photographer Ben Jastremski, ‘Every Image I Make Is the Permission I Was Never Given’
War Still Rages in Ukraine. Photographer Conall Kearney Is There to Document It.
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