CARLOS DETRES
New Orleans–based photographer and artist whose work investigates perception, memory, traces, and transformation. Through photographs, books, installations, and ongoing visual research, he explores how people construct meaning from fragments left behind by time, history, nature, and human experience.
His projects have been exhibited in galleries, collected internationally, and recognized through awards and publications. Current work focuses on traces as marks left by contact—between people, places, memory, life, death, and the natural world.
Ongoing observations, experiments, and research can be found in Field Notes.
Selected Projects
HOW TO MAKE A GHOST (2026)
How to Make a Ghost examines the conditions under which a presence might be felt rather than seen.
The Weight of Silence
There is a specific kind of density that settles in a room when the most important things are left unsaid. These images are a study of that pressure—the effort required to keep the air still.
HAIRNOMICON: COMMUNIQUÉS FROM BEYOND THE CHAIR
(2013)
Hairnomicon draws on early spirit photography and occult horror cinema to stage a darkly humorous encounter with the supernatural.
NOTES
Notes is a space for fragments, observations, and peripheral thoughts that inform the work. These entries do not function as explanations, but as adjacent material—recording questions, influences, and moments of attention that sit alongside the projects.
While writing about the transition between older work and How to Make a Ghost, I realized the work hadn’t changed subjects but had instead changed methods. What I once saw as separate bodies of work now feels like different approaches to the same investigation.