Chandra McCormick (b. 1957) and Keith Calhoun (b. 1955) Are Contemporary American Artists. Documentary photographers living and working in New Orleans. Since the early 1980s, McCormick and Calhoun use their cameras to provide visual testimony to the lived experiences of Black life in the U.S. South. They engage photography as a site of social activism by documenting, illuminating, and conveying the struggles and celebrations of the Black American experience. Their images bear witness to the social realities of Black life historicizing and archiving the rich, unique traditions and deep rooted attributes of Louisiana culture and the Black experience. McCormick and Calhoun have received numerous awards for their photographic work, which has been widely cited and exhibited, including in the 56th International Biennale Arte Exhibition, All the World Futures. Exhibition, “Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex,” Venice, Italy (2015); and Prospect 3: Notes for Now (2014–15)The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, “We No Longer Consider Them Damaged” the Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota (2020); “Labor Studies” the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2018); Prospect Memory Project, Memoirs of the Lower 9th Ward, A Public Art Sculpture, 2023-2024. Seeing Black, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, 2025, National Geographic Story Tellers Summit, 2019, Art in America, 2014, Smithsonian Magazine, 2020, Hyperallergic, 2018, Muse magazine, 2020, Art Review London, 2024, CBS News Sunday Morning, and PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 2008.

Artist Statement

Our work centers on everyday people, many whose lives are rooted in Louisiana’s southern soil and woven into the fabric of American society. We're drawn to and choose photography for its power to convey stories, how a single image can speak volumes. Through the lens, we spotlight the builders, planters, caretakers, and laborers of New Orleans and the Deep American South, those who nurture and endure, whose hands shape the land through relentless struggle. Our photographs honor their resilience and labor, preserving and illuminating the quiet strength and profound humanity of lives too often overlooked and many times silenced.