In a Neoclassical Revival house on Durham’s former “Mansion Row” sits the studio of artist and photographer Kennedi Carter. The building itself possesses a layered history. Built in the early twentieth century for a wealthy grocer, it remained a private residence until the 1940s, before serving as a USO facility during World War II. In the decades that followed, it shifted once again into domestic use, eventually fell into disrepair, and was later restored to house the Durham Crisis Response Center, which provided support for survivors of rape and domestic violence. The layered history of the space feels particularly resonant in relation to Carter’s practice, which traces multiple lineages at once—familial, ancestral, cultural, geographic, and photographic—while considering how memory and identity are carried across generations.

Ridin’ Sucka Free - Carter’s longest ongoing project - is a photographic exploration of Black horsemanship and its connections to history, land, labor, and community in the American South. Through portraits of Black riders and equestrian culture, Carter examines horsemanship as both an inherited tradition and a contemporary expression of freedom, care, and self-determination. In the statement for this work, she writes: “The act of riding becomes a means of escape, an assertion of presence, and a reclaiming of space.” The project moves between formal portraiture and more observational documentary images, yet across both approaches there remains a consistent sensitivity and intimacy—qualities that extend throughout Carter’s broader practice.

In 2022, Kennedi Carter gave birth to her son, Atlas. Amid a complicated premature pregnancy—and while grappling with the seeming fragility of her burgeoning career—a new body of work emerged: Everything I Don’t Know You Can Teach Me. In her essay “Captive Maternal” for Southern Cultures, Carter writes, “I immersed myself in my work, using my practice to digest the trauma of his birth.” The project that followed became an inquiry into Black matrescence, lineage, and intergenerational memory. Through portraiture, archival family imagery, and oral histories, Carter reflects on motherhood as a collective and inherited experience shaped by family, community, care, and choice. Beyond the figures that populate these intimate and beautiful photographs is a strong and enduring sense of place. The red soil and overgrown lushness of the Piedmont become integral to the work’s atmosphere; the heat and humidity feel almost palpable, lending the images a near-synesthetic quality.

More recently, Carter initiated The Water Bring We, The Water Wanna Take We Back, another ongoing body of work, this one examining the culture, spirituality, and environmental precarity of the Gullah Geechee corridor. Drawing on Gullah-Geechee cosmology, oral tradition, and the symbolic role of water as both origin and threshold, Carter considers the enduring relationship between land, memory, and ancestral continuity in the Low Country South. 

Across Kennedi Carter’s work—including her vibrant editorial practice—there is a sustained commitment to representing Black life as expansive, self-determined, and collective. That sense of collectivity exists not only within the images themselves, but within the photographic process that produces them. Her projects engage questions of community, history, and lineage while also forging new relationships between photographer and subject, image and lived experience. Carter’s presence behind—and at times in front of—the camera remains palpable throughout: visible in the trust her subjects extend toward her, and in the attentiveness with which she photographs them in return. Rather than reducing her subjects to symbols or narratives, Carter allows for complexity, intimacy, and contradiction to remain intact. In doing so, her photographs become more than documents of people or place; they function as relational acts, shaped as much by reciprocity and recognition as by observation alone.