Carolyn Campbell is a photographic artist, writer and lecturer based in Los Angeles. In 2020, she was awarded an Artist Grant from the City of West Hollywood for her City of Immortals project. In addition to her bestselling debut book, “City of Immortals,” she has contributed essays and images to several fiction and nonfiction books.
On November 6, 2021 at the Théâtre Raymond Kabbaz (TRK) in Los Angeles, a day-long festival adapted from “City of Immortals” brought the cultural icons buried in Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery to life. The event included a photography exhibition, original works of theatre and music, a documentary film, a book signing and conversation with Carolyn Campbell.
Goff Books (an imprint of ORO Editions) released City of Immortals: Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris a 200-page non-fiction work that was named #2 on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List and #1 Hot New Release on Amazon. “It is a Louvre for the departed,” said reviewer Genie Davis in Artillery Magazine. A GPS Tour App in French and English featuring her text and images came out in audio on a new platform in 2023. A sought-after lecturer, she is an authority on funerary symbols and the sculpture and architecture of 19th century cemeteries.
Her first-person account of this legendary necropolis celebrates the novelty and eccentricity of Père-Lachaise Cemetery through the engrossing story of the history of the site established by Napoleonic decree along with portraits of the last moments of the cultural icons buried within its walls. The book is illustrated with full color photos by Campbell taken over 40 years, as well as those of her colleague British landscape photographer Joe Cornish. In addition to several “conversations” with some of the high-profile residents, three guided tours are provided along with an illustrated pull-out map featuring the grave sites of eighty-four architects, artists, writers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers and actors, including Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison of the Doors. Frédéric Chopin, Georges Bizet, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Isadora Duncan, Eugène Delacroix, Gertrude Stein, Amedeo Modigliani, Sarah Bernhardt, Simone Signoret, Colette and Marcel Proust.
Her photographs have been shown in the Los Angeles Center of Photography’s (LACP) Seventh Annual Members’ Exhibition; October, 2021. LACP juror LeRonn Brooks chose an image by Campbell based on “creativity, originality and quality.” Brooks is the Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute.
Two of her photographs were featured in the LENSCRATCH exhibition celebrating International Women’s Day from Campbell’s series, “2017 Women’s March, Los Angeles.” Campbell’s image “Manzanita” was featured in Kim Abeles’ installation “The Map is the Legend (Equidistant Inland Empire)” as part of “In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California, 1950 to the Present” at UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography curated by Douglas McCulloh. This installation, renamed “Mapping the Sublime” at the Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale, CA organized by Lawrence and Beth Davila Waldman was on view April 2- June 11, 2022.
Photo and original story by Campbell were included in the anthology, “Artists, ART & Story: Southern California” coordinated by Karrie Ross with a Foreword by Hilarie Kelly. Original artworks and stories by Southern California artists. Number four in the series, “Our Ever Changing World: Through the Eyes of Artists.”
Campbell also participated in “Starless Midnight” an exhibition co-curated by Edgar Arceneaux and Laurence Sillars at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in London. Her large format images are part of Micol Hebron’s collaborative exhibition within the Baltic’s “Starless Midnight” show. Hebron’s “(En)Gendered(In)Equity: The Gallery Tally Poster Project” is an international traveling show that, in addition to being seen in London, was most recently installed at “Fair Market” – an all women art fair at the Brickell City Center during Art Basel Miami.
The “Gallery Tally” exhibition has been traveling since its inception in 2013. Campbell’s four female funerary images from her cemetery series (please see the Gallery Tally works on the Portfolio page) have been included in exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, Puerto Rico and Santiago, Chile. These images are an outgrowth of her decades-long exploration and documentation of Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Campbell’s earliest photographic experiments were in portraiture and urban still life, which began when her mother gave her a Rolleicord camera when she went off to college. Many of her subjects were her art school friends and their studios. Those early roots in photography expanded and deepened with curators Jane Livingston and Frances Fralin when she later worked with them at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. While promoting Livingston and Fralin’s exhibitions of historical and contemporary photography at the museum, she was influenced by artists who showed there such as William Christenberry, Jan Groover, Sally Mann and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as studying with Corcoran faculty, including Frank DiPerna, Mike Mitchell and Steve Szabo. Her photography has consistently included urban and art world subjects focusing on a sense of place.
She has written about the arts and culture in her roles as an executive at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the American Film Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of the Arts and Architecture where she served as editor of the school’s UCLArts magazine and contributed to other university publications. She currently in development on a documentary based on “City of Immortals” and working as an arts and communications consultant.
A sought-out lecturer on Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery, she has also given PR and marketing seminars at the Los Angeles Artists Association, the Getty Center Education Fund, the California Arts Council, UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Culture, and Otis College of Art and Design.
A native of Washington, DC, she is a summa cum laude graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She has recently been appointed to the MICA President’s Global Advisory Council (PGAC) and is a member of ArtTable, the Los Angeles Center for Photography, the National Writers Union and PEN America.