Casey Joiner
“A Kind of Violence."
Casey Joiner’s journey to photography began with a long, thoughtful walk.
During a tumultuous period in her personal life, a photographer friend invited Joiner to accompany him on slow, quiet strolls around the neighborhood, his camera in tow—“photo walks.” The exercise was intended to clear her head and relax within the safe confines of friendship, but Joiner gleaned something unexpectedly precious and revelatory from the practice.
“I just was watching him take photos, and he was working with mostly 35 millimeter film,” she recalled. “It was very slow, and kind of meditative, and really deliberate. It may have just been the right thing at the right time for me to experience.”
Casey Joiner
"The Plain Sense of Things"
At her friend’s urging, Joiner soon bought a cheap, vintage 35 millimeter, fully manual camera. From that point on, she immersed herself in all things film—researching online, watching video tutorials—and she “never looked back.” Eventually, her passion for photography morphed into a job, and later an established career. Her work has been featured at Institute 193 in Lexington, Kentucky, and Sibyl Gallery and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
“It kind of started in the way that it remains,” Joiner reflected. “My practice. It was just a way to make sense of some things that I maybe didn’t really know how to … [and it] sort of gave me the language that I didn’t really have before.”
Casey Joiner
"Eggshells"
A quiet contemplation pervades Joiner’s sprawling body of work, most of which has been shot in New Orleans or other parts of Louisiana. Each image is imbued with an elegant intimacy, something thoughtful and knowing suffusing the light, the objects, the hint of wind mid-gust. These are utterly ordinary moments—yet captured as if the mundanities possess within them a sacredness and profundity worthy of pause. Glimpse, for instance, the slightly stirring floral curtains asymmetrically framing a ripe, freshly cut tomato in her collection, Surrounded By Natural Causes, or a stack of gracefully illuminated corningware dishes surrounded by canisters on a crowded shelf, found in her collection, Holy Mess of Ordinary Pleasures. Joiner invites the viewer to revel in the bliss of the vastly and utterly normal, and to find there some kind of emotional resonance.
Casey Joiner
"Remember What You Must"
She continues to take long walks to find her subjects, shooting anything that catches her eye. These, naturally, result in her unexpected street scenes, their frozen motion and haunting disjointedness blessed accidents of circumstance.
“You could feel the people, you know, you can feel the presence of people, like this is a place touched by people—but just maybe not a physical form of a person in the frame.” —Casey Joiner
Casey Joiner
"Dawn and It's Excesses"
“It’s always been little, like, oddities—things that would maybe go unnoticed, things that seem sort of out of place, but really resonate with me for some reason,” she said. It is, ultimately, an act shrouded in peaceful silence, slow and deliberate reflection that pulls her into focus. Much of her subject matter, perhaps for this reason, rarely involves people directly. “You could feel the people, you know, you can feel the presence of people, like this is a place touched by people—but just maybe not a physical form of a person in the frame,” she added. When people do happen to populate her photographs, they are often framed as solitary, anonymous, fragmented; they could be anyone, and that is the point. What matters, instead, are their composite parts that we all possess, from hair follicles and dew drops of sweat, to jutting bones and calloused feet.
“Instead of just prescribing meaning, or you know, my own thoughts about something, to allow someone to have their own experience with the work is kind of what I’ve always wanted,” she said.
Casey Joiner
"In the Truck Forever"
Accordingly, Joiner’s work is purposefully relatable, and echoes the communities which she has made her home, from her childhood in Baton Rouge to her adulthood in New Orleans. “I’ve always just been in sort of a documentary or post-documentary tradition, really beholden to what is around me,” she explained. The familiarity of a stoop, overgrown garden, or window into a local eatery evokes a sense that the viewer is, themselves, in the moment—it could be any vanishing impression in their blurred and overpacked rolodex of memory. In Southern Louisiana, which glimmers with prismatic facets of slightly-different sameness, these sundry visions hold power.
“That is something I’ve always felt true about photography,” Joiner said. “I like to approach things in a non-hierarchal way, as far as subject matter. I don’t think one thing is really more important than another thing.”
Casey joiner
"Finitude"
Photography gave Joiner access to a language she needed to make sense of the world, and in her forthcoming book, Housekeeping (January 2026), she uses her new vocabulary to navigate memory, grief, and loss. Joiner began the work in 2021, while her father was battling a cancer diagnosis. He died in 2023; Joiner finished her project in 2025. Centered at Joiner’s ancestral home in Baton Rouge, the book also includes some vernacular photography and old photographs from her grandparents and father.
“It’s meant to feel sort of how memory feels,” she said. “You know, not so linear. And not always, maybe, truthful.”
Learn more at caseyejoiner.com.
