Join PhotoAlliance for the Spring 2024 lecture series with renowned California photographer Carolyn Drake and local and Cairo-based photographer Ebti. “PhotoAlliance Lecture Series: Carolyn Drake and Ebtihal Shedid” happens in the Bayfront Theatre, Building B, Third, Floor, at Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture (FMCAC) on Sunday, March 3, 2024, 5:00 p.m.

The two artists focus on how photographs are constructed materially, intellectually, and emotionally. Magnum photographer Carolyn Drake offers insight into her new work and publication Men Untitled (TBW 2023), which challenges entrenched binaries around gender and the male gaze in photography and our broader culture. Egyptian-American artist Ebti shares her installation-based photography, including work in her upcoming solo show at FMCAC hosted by SF Camerawork, Ma-kan مكان.

Carolyn Drake works on long-term, photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and creatively re-imagine them. Her practice embraces collaboration and combines photography with sewing, collage, and sculpture. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries.

Drake was born in California and studied Media/Culture and History in the early 1990s at Brown University. Following her graduation from Brown in 1994, Drake moved to New York and worked as a interactive designer for many years before departing to engage with the physical world through photography.

Between 2007 and 2013, Drake traveled frequently to Central Asia from her base in Istanbul to work on two long term projects: Two Rivers (2007-2013) and Wild Pigeon (2007-2014). The latter work was acquired by the SFMOMA in San Francisco and presented at a six-month solo exhibition in 2018. In Internat (2014-2017), Drake worked with young women in an ex-Soviet orphanage to create photographs and paintings. This work was followed by Knit Club (TBW Books, 2020), which emerged from her collaboration with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi loosely calling themselves Knit Club and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo Aperture Book of the Year and Lucie Photo Book Awards. Her latest project Men Untitled (TBW Books 2023) was awarded the 2021 HCB Award by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Carolyn Drake’s work has been supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, the Anamorphosis Prize book prize, Peter S Reed Foundation, Lightwork, the Do Good Fund, the Lange Taylor prize, Magnum Foundation, Pulitzer Center, and a Fulbright fellowship. She is a member of Magnum Photos and is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.

Ebti is a multidisciplinary artist, a self-taught photographer, and a translator living between Cairo and San Francisco. Ebti comes from a background of linguistics, translation, and intercultural communication, and is interested in topics surrounding how language shapes the way we see and interpret ideas such as storytelling, belonging, and attachment. She has a BA in German studies from Cairo University, Egypt, an MA in translation and intercultural studies from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, and an MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

After a year and a half of wonderful programs in partnership around the San Francisco Bay Area, PhotoAlliance looks forward to welcoming all to the historic Bayfront Theatre, where they plan to offer 2024 programs.

* Students are always welcome to attend PhotoAlliance lectures for free, please tell our check-in volunteer you are a student and show your school ID. There is no need for students to pre-register for a ticket in advance.