Carla Williams

She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography.

• Born — 1965 • Birthplace — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Education — * Princeton University (BA) • University of New Mexico (MA and MFA) • Awards — Guggenheim Fellowship (2025) • Website — carlajwilliams.net

Carla Williams was born in 1965 in Los Angeles, daughter of Evelyn and Wendell Williams. She was raised at a Catholic church during her youth and attended a Catholic school, with her childhood experiences also "infused with New Orleans culture". Williams obtained a BA in Photography from Princeton University, where she created 72 self-portraits for her BFA thesis exhibition. Her advisor Emmet Gowin called her BFA work "the best thesis show he'd seen" during his teaching career. She later moved to the University of New Mexico, where she obtained her MA and MFA. Concerned about the commercial nature of art, Williams started as a photography curator, working at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (1992-1993), J. Paul Getty Museum (1997-1999) and the College of Santa Fe's Thaw Art History Center (1999-2002). In 2002, she and Deborah Willis wrote The Black Female Body: A Photographic History. After working as a photography instructor at Pomona College (1994) and as an adjunct professor of history of photography and photography at the College of Santa Fe's Marion Center for Photographic Arts (2001-2002), she worked as a photography professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology until 2013. She also served as a board member for the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, a publications committee advisor for the Society for Photographic Education, and arts advisory committee member for the Museum of the African Diaspora. In 2016, she started Material Life, a New Orleans store that sells African-American art. Williams said of her decision to create self-portraits at Princeton: "I was a young Black woman. I was curious to see my likeness. I was taking Peter Bunnell's History of Photography course, and I wasn't represented in what I was seeing." Another inspiration she cited in her interest in self-portraits was the way "self-portraiture collapsed the relationship between the photographer and the subject" instead of having a third-party set up the camera. She has also cited Alfred Stieglitz's photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe; Catholic art; "images that male photographers made of their wives, girlfriends and muses"; Playboy and Penthouse spreads; and Cindy Sherman among her inspirations. In 2023, Higher Pictures hosted Williams' first solo exhibition, Circa 1985, where she remade her thesis self-portraits. The same year, TBW Books released Tender, Williams' first monograph which then won the year's Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award for First PhotoBook. The book and gallery had come to fruition after Paul Sepuya learned about her old photographs on Instagram (where she posted them while her store closed during the COVID-19 pandemic) and showed them to TBW founder Paul Schiek. In 2025, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography. Williams's work was included in the 2025 exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 at the National Gallery of Art.

Originally living in Rochester, Williams moved to New Orleans because "it really had a hold on me", moving to an Eastlake style house in the 7th Ward. She owns a dog named Ferdinand. She is lesbian. In 2002, Williams published two books for The Child's World: Thurgood Marshall: 1908-1993 and The Underground Railroad.

• (with Deborah Willis) The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (2002)