Everyone is here.
Eloise, the matriarch. Uncle Oliver. Jahzie and Cousin Jasmine. The nieces and nephews and grandbabies. Under shaded tents, plates overflow with fried fish and macaroni salad as elders hold court, trading stories about “the old record shop on Avalon” and the Los Angeles they remember “before the riots.” Overhead, airplanes screech across a fat blue sky in a hurry to who knows where. But here, in a backyard on Cimarron Street on the last Saturday in July, conversation bounces from table to table, mouth to mouth, and the harmony of the day falls into place.
The Smith family has gathered to celebrate the gift of tradition. As a handful of people in attendance will repeat over the course of the afternoon, today is about not letting “the recipes” die. “It’s really important to stay in touch with your history. I don’t want us to lose that,” Jasmine says.
Among the crowd is Micaiah Carter, who, at 31, has established himself as one of the most in-demand photographers of his generation. Carter is also more than a photographer who has shot fashion spreads for Vogue, Valentino and Ralph Lauren, or whose portraiture has been featured on the covers of Essence and GQ. He architects across genre and industry, directing music videos (“Need It Bad” by Ama and Brent Faiyaz) while also shooting album covers for your favorite artists (Leikeli47, Kimbra, Skilla Baby) and collaborating with the biggest brands in the world (Nike, Apple).
Today, Carter is simply family, part of the Smiths’ extended clan. He hails from Victorville, the high desert town off Route 66, and when he moved to L.A. from New York, he and Jasmine became fast friends. They’ve been inseparable ever since. “I felt comfortable around her because they reminded me of my own family,” he says. “That bond, that closeness — those types of things inspire me to show up and take photos of people. To showcase that they are important.”
Though Carter’s oeuvre carries recurring themes — bold lived-in colors, fashion captured through a documentary POV, the breadth of Black identity — family is the subject he finds himself returning to most often as of late. When you are among kin, he tells me, “It is more so about amplifying the beauty that’s there. And the simplicity too.”
As laughter and a symphony of hey baby’s perfume the air, he gives into the simplicity of the moment. Today is what it is all about. Carter will later tell me he approaches his craft with a genuine curiosity for what is possible when you open yourself to the present, and what it asks. His is a vocation to un-forgetting, to recording the memories of tomorrow’s yesterday.
Family has always been central to Carter’s universe, the axis on which he discovered his path.
His paternal roots stretch back to Oklahoma, and his mother’s side of the family hails from Kentucky, which is to say that he was raised with Southern sensibilities from the start. Church was a constant. His mother, Karen, sang in the choir, and his father, Andrew, was a deacon. Not until Carter was 13 could he listen to “worldly music,” but those limitations gave him a special appreciation for gospel, acts like the Clark Sisters, Mary Mary and Kirk Franklin, who would shape his approach as an artist even before he knew he wanted to pick up a camera. Even now, it is music Carter turns to most while creating or on set. “That was my biggest thing. And I always go back to that because it’s not visual. So I’m able to pull emotions and color,” he says.
During summer trips to Oklahoma, Carter spent a lot of time at a local kids club in Ardmore. One day, the proctor let him use her computer and without anyone knowing he uploaded all her music to his MP3 player. “I’ll never forget when I heard ‘T-Shirt’ by Destiny’s Child and I was like, ‘Oh, s—.’ It was a different type of mood. I had never felt sexuality in a thought before, and what that means.” Across the runway of his career — working with everyone from Sia to astronaut Victor Glover, even shooting a young Zendaya for Elle — he has attempted to transport those same feelings into his iconography, suffusing his images with the garden of textures that gospel and R&B music taught him to look for. The results are emotional rather than decorative.
That Carter’s photos now feel immediately recognizable without relying on a single visual trick is no coincidence. Coming from Victorville, he wasn’t used to areas with no light and didn’t understand how it could travel through different tunnels down the street, reflecting so spectacularly off high-rise buildings. That way of seeing — or rather, learning to see anew — he picked up while living in New York, where he attended the Parsons School of Design. Though he counts photographers John H. White and Philip-Lorca diCorcia as motivating forces, it was Dana Lixenberg who, with her black-and-white hip-hop portraits of Tupac and Lil’ Kim, gave him a road map of what he wanted to achieve. Lixenberg’s photo series “Imperial Courts,” about residents of the Watts housing project, which she shot between 1993 and 2015, was likewise an animating factor behind the creative vision and legacy he wanted to build.
“When it comes to skin tones and representation, I try my best to not change how they look,” Carter tells me from the den of his Pico-Robertson apartment, in the first in a series of conversations we have. It doesn’t matter the subject or setting, Carter is always aiming to communicate a particular mood: “ethereal and uplifting.” Ultimately, it is about chasing a feeling of what he knows to be true, and what he wants others to also recognize. “It’s me wanting to see the full spectrum of being a human.”
Though Carter’s professional body of work is rooted in the here and now, his personal photographs function in a different register. They are like passageways through time, or perhaps beyond it, where Blackness is the default and love has many homes, each image a threshold of possibility and reclamation. Sit with his images and you will also see: the kin that populate his frame do not take utopia for granted because, like anyone who has tasted it, like anyone who has found restoration in its lush meadows, they know it is not a place but a people. Utopia exists between the care and the kisses and the how you doin’s, it becomes flesh and bone in the embrace of full body hugs and smiles so wide they could devour the sun. It is made real simply by being among your family, be they blood or chosen.
Carter moved back to California in 2024 after years in New York. His return to Victorville was occasioned by a need to be closer to family, and though grief from his father’s passing in 2021 still encircled him, he realized how central his community was to his unfolding as an artist. A calling was reawakened.
He tells me he is now spurred by the desire to assemble an archive specifically dedicated to the people — portraits of family and friends — who feel like home. “Pink,” a series of photos from 2025, a conjuring of childhood nostalgia and Afrofuturism, was the beginning of that exploration, and one he has only continued to build on since officially setting roots in L.A. last year.
Carter talks about the logistics of being on set, and the meticulous labor of accounting for every last detail, and how, at this point in his life, shoots where he can freestyle in the moment are where he feels most like himself in his work. “Being in the present and being inspired by the present,” he says, trailing off. “I don’t want to get into the trend of always having to find a particular reference to get my point across. I want to create work that isn’t trying to sell something or be a public relation for something.”
The cookout on Cimarron Street is another opportunity, and he’s determined not to waste it. As family members mill about, Carter pulls them into the eye of his orbit. It is here, in his frame of recognition, that the Smith family is uplifted and seen, and not because they have demanded such a thing, but because this is how they love. Love is an acknowledgment, a kind of sight. It is an action but it is also seeing in action. A knowing that only some will comprehend, and when they do, on days like this where family is ship and sea — a love that carries and a love that is infinite — it is all the more meaningful.
Eloise takes her place. Everyone looks on and it’s obvious why: She is practically glowing in an angelic white pantsuit and a yellow blouse. Carter, giddy with anticipation, gets to work. “She’ll be 85 next year,” Jasmine says as we stand at a distance. “She’s the matriarch now.”
“We have a lot of pictures of our family. We’ve always taken them. But it’s nice to have Micaiah, who is a professional, see us like this,” Oliver adds.
There is no escaping the primal substance of memory, and its place in our lives, and what Carter does best, particularly with a project like this, is remind us where we can find it, and what we must give into: among family, love and surrender are all you need. It’s the surrender — that willingness to let go and let others in — that I find myself most compelled by when I enter his gaze. For our presence to take hold, we must lay bare the emotions we covet so stubbornly, the emotions found in the look of those we love, of those we call family. In the care of one another, our archive begins to take shape.
That’s where we find who we are.
Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired and a documentary producer.
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