Jon B. Carroll is a photography enthusiast using images and interpretive drawings to study cultural landscapes. His diverse background—a rancher, architect, and mountain guide—inform his exploration of land use and social conflict.
He is self-taught, having discovered in college at a yard sale an old rangefinder camera and two books in a wooden box—Ulf Richter: Oskar Barnack, Von der Idee zur Kamera and The Americans by Robert Frank. He then dropped out of graduate school and worked for the government being sent to the Ukraine during protests for its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union. While learning to develop film at night, he was influenced by members of the Kharkiv School of Photography and the “Panorama” group, including Mikhailov and Solonsky. When he returned to complete his graduate thesis - researching settlement patterns in post-reconstruction Alabama - photography was a major part.
Photography, Boris Mikhailov contends, must “speak the truth—not conform to the predetermined idea—and tap into the collective unconscious.” Such process illuminates the influence of physical place in the formation of consciousness. Carroll’s work is an examination of how physical form in landscape can contribute to marginalization. Revealing a hidden transcript of race—reinforcing ideas embedded in our collective subconscious.
He has self-published three zines about the Shining Mountains, A Horse Named Hellboy and Let Us Go to Dothan, the latter a part of his graduate landscape architecture thesis at Auburn University. His photographic and video work have appeared on PBS and Independent Lens, and his videos are part the award-winning documentary No Man’s Land.
He can be reached below.
Thank you!