Charity Rachelle is an American lens-based documentary artist exploring tradition and tribalism in the Deep South. Interested in investigating complexities that are too often reduced to stereotypes and cliches, Charity employs the use of misunderstanding and expectations as tools to conjure ideas, conversations, and contemplative evolution. She is interested in dissecting and subverting dominate societal narratives, and can often be found immersing herself in the subcultures of fringe communities order to more deeply understand controversial belief systems.

Working from within the tension between social and political divisions, Charity intentionally practices non-judgment towards the subjects of her photographs. This approach allows her to constantly reevaluate imposed societal binaries of good/bad right/wrong in both herself and others. She believes that these binaries construct barriers between people groups, and that dismantling division among humankind is the most important challenge of our time.

Charity was born in rural Alabama and currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama. She is a 2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Gay Burke Memorial Photography Fellow. Additional awards include the Verdant Fund Project Grant (2022), and Alabama State Council on the Arts Media/Photography Fellow (2018). She has presented her work at Artfields (2019), and The Wiregrass Museum of Art (2018). Charity is a member of Women Photograph (2022-present). She works as an assignment photographer for publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Guardian, and The Atlantic.

Artist portrait by Moe Kite.