Biography
RCarlos Detres is a photographer based in New Orleans whose work explores memory, presence, and perception through place-based and conceptual projects. His photographs are less concerned with depiction than with the specific conditions under which something might be felt—how absence registers, how memory lingers, and how the unseen presses against the visible.
Detres’s work approaches haunting not as spectacle, but as a quiet and persistent condition. Landscapes, bodies, and constructed scenes function as sites where trace and sensation intersect, often shaped by distance, obscuration, and the medium’s inability to fully describe what it records. Uncertainty and failure are treated not as deficits, but as necessary pressures within the work.
Originally trained in film production and photography, Detres’s practice has shifted from editorial contexts toward a slower, long-form inquiry. Working in New Orleans—a place where history remains materially present—he uses photography to examine how memory migrates from place to image to body, without offering resolution.