Koral Carballo (Poza Rica, Veracruz, Mexico, 1987) Photojournalist, Documentary photographer, and Visual Artist. Her career began as a local photojournalist in 2009. In 2014 through an intimate process of reflection, she started with her projects, investigating strategies of self-representation, and expanding the limits of documentary and photojournalistic practice.
In recent years she has been researching: how to sensorial document the pain of violence in the war on drugs. And its relation to memory. In addition, in 2015 she began to reflect on her origin, starting work on the invisibility of Afrodescence in Veracruz, working collaboratively in Coyolillo, Veracruz with the collective Ri-sueños and the artisan Octavio López Zaragoza.
Through direct photography, fiction, and archiving, she is currently researching artistic processes of documentation, as well as methodologies of systematization and preservation of the Afro-Mexican family archive, working in collaboration with Dora Careaga Coleman, Colectivo Afrotamiahua and the Fototeca Nacional.
Her work has received Catchlight Global Fellow, National Geographic Society Grant, POY LATAM's Nuestra Mirada award in second place, the Woman Photograph and Getty Images Grant, the Open Society Foundations Moving Walls 25 Fellowship, and received first place in the portfolio review of the Latin American Photography Colloquium (2017).
Her personal work has been published in the British Journal of Photography, Ph Museum, C&América Latina, Frezze Magazine, Vice Colombia, and Der Grief Magazine. She has been commissioned for Bloomberg News, The New York Times, California Sunday Magazine, Agence France Presse, Ruptly, NPR, Washington Post, and Animal Político among others.
She founded together with a group of photojournalists from Veracruz 2014 the International Festival of Journalistic and Documentary Photography Mirar Distinto in Mexico and currently co-produces.
She is a member of Foto Féminas, Fotógrafas en México, Frontline Freelance México, Diversify Photo and Women Photograph.
Koral is Leica's ambassador in Latin America and collaborates with
Ruda Collective.