Caroline Vaughan

Caroline Vaughan is one of only ten photographers selected by the North Carolina Museum of Art as the foundation of their contemporary photography collection. Vaughan's photographs offer inspired and surprising visions of landscapes, still lifes, and the human form. Her images of nature and people, sometimes surreal and often arresting, follow each other to create a visual poem of opposition and likeness, physical beauty and balance. Compelling the viewer’s attention with delicate rich tones and meticulous technique, she holds the viewer’s gaze even when her subject is difficult.

“The sight of any one of a number of photographs by Caroline Vaughan can clean my sight like a fierce but soon forbearing solvent. In her work, the Earth is its full best self—a self from all its billion selves, all things to all creatures: terror and joy, our hope of rescue, our eventual rest.”—Reynolds Price

“Devastating and quietly revealing. There is something both equalizing and transforming that takes place when a subject is placed in Vaughan’s lens. She has a way of evoking and capturing a moment of intense self-recognition in her subjects.”—Alex Harris

Caroline Vaughan has photographed the North American landscape for over thirty years. A student of Minor White at MIT, she was also influenced by Imogen Cunningham. Her photographs have appeared in many publications, including Aperture, Parnassus, and Camera. Exhibited widely, her work has been on display at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Burden Gallery of the Aperture Foundation, and at other museums and galleries across the nation. A collection of her work, Borrowed Time, was published by Duke University Press. She is also featured in Quartet: Four North Carolina Photographers, published by Safe Harbor Books.