courtney coles

I am a Black-American photographer and leatherdyke who was born and raised in Sylmar, California. I received my MFA in Photography & Media from California Institute of the Arts in 2019 and my BFA in Photography from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2014.

My work takes on many forms and they all come back to one thing: home. I have researched and challenged the concepts of home and how it dances with the ways people, places and memories are linked to it. Within these homes, I write my love letters to light and dance in its shadows. I am in love with gentle tension and aggressive sensuality. The fleeting moments of pleasure in a world so repressed are memorialized in my archive where these fragmented memories come with their own soundtrack. 

I live in that small space between private desire and public spectacle; it is small moments, carefully observed, rarely touched, always dreamt about. Within this space with my loved ones, we’ve built a world on the foundation of mutual trust and sweet eroticism. I frequently step back and observe the way bodies dance; the movement and the stillness of lovers on a dance floor, the shapes of bodies imprinted on bed sheets, a disco ball sitting in a living room. 

Along with making photographs in the music industry, I have had the fortunate opportunity to make portraits for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Substream Magazine, idobi Radio, Highlight Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle and Hopeless Records. In 2022, I was part of a package with the Wall Street Journal that was a Pulitzer Finalist. 

I am currently an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Cypress College.

When looking to commission me, I am interested in making photographs about Black mothers and their relationships with their daughters, stories about families, stories about the lgbtq+ community, artists in their workspaces, musicians in the recording studio and intimate domestic spaces. I am also interested in documenting the intricacies that live within Leather.

I have shared my work in classrooms at the following institutions:
-Las Fotos Projects
-New York Film Academy
-Pacific Northwest College of Art
-The University of California, Los Angeles
-The University of California, Santa Barbara
-The University of California, San Diego

Affiliates:
diversify photo
women photograph
to the front (co-founder)

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Selected Interviews:
Photographer Life Check with Qurissy (March 2025)
Strange Fire Collective (October 2020)
Musée Magazine (July 2020)
Hyperallergic: At CalArts, Graduating Students Are Making Sincere and Rigorous Work (April 2019)
The Week (May 2016)