Biografía — Persia Campbell

Bio

Persia Campbell (b. Ciudad Juárez, Mexico) is a photographer and director whose work examines how feminine identity has been constructed on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The visual record of Ciudad Juárez was made in public space. Public space in that city has never belonged to women: some move through it, none possess it. An archive built entirely on the street is therefore an archive that cannot hold their lives, because it is looking precisely where they are least able to be. Their absence from the record of the period is not an oversight but a consequence of where the camera was placed. Campbell photographs the interior instead, not as a private counterpoint to a public history but as the location of the life that was left out.

The interior is not sovereign either. In every series a television or a newspaper sits somewhere in the room, broadcasting a police operation, a cartel killing, the beating of students. The street enters the room it excluded these women from. Neither space belongs to them, and the withdrawal of her subjects follows from that. They are turned away, obscured, reflected inside a framed photograph on a mantelpiece, or reduced to a hand emerging through a curtain. Where there is no space of one's own there are no conditions for appearing, and self-portraiture becomes an act of withholding.

Her method comes from film. Campbell works as a production designer and set decorator, and constructs each environment rather than locating it, furnishing it with the material of the border: period objects, artificial flowers, Catholic devotional imagery, cathode-ray televisions. She builds the colour as well, working in palettes she assembles rather than finds. Nothing in her frames is generated. Every set exists physically in front of the camera and is dismantled afterwards. The work ranges in scale from a single object isolated against a field of colour to a fully dressed room.

Itinerario de una mujer en la frontera (2020) opened the investigation. Reminiscencias de la Frontera (2021, ongoing) turns to private space during the years of the drug war. Ficheras: The Last Cabaret (2023) addresses the cabaret hostess of Mexican nightlife cinema, a figure produced by a genre written, directed and produced by men, in which the female image functioned as decoration. Liminal Spaces (2025) works in the stretch between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso where belonging is suspended. Mitologías domésticas (2026) extends the work into fully constructed domestic mythology.

Campbell is a two-time recipient of Mexico's FONCA Jóvenes Creadores grant, most recently in 2026. She was shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards in 2026, won Female in Focus from the British Journal of Photography, and placed second in the TIME and ASMP portraiture competition. Her photograph 2006 was selected by Damarice Amao, curator and attachée de conservation at the Cabinet de la photographie, Centre Pompidou, for the LifeFramer Colors award.

Her work has been shown at The Photography Show by AIPAD in New York, Zona Maco in Mexico City, the Barcelona Photography Biennial, the PhotoVogue Festival in Milan, Centro de la Imagen and the Museo de San Ildefonso in Mexico City, and in the Sony World Photography Awards travelling exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and the Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini in Milan. Her work has been published in Vogue, The Guardian, TIME, Vice, Nylon and Cuartoscuro. She lives and works in El Paso, Texas.

Persia Campbell

Photo Series

About

Instagram