Born in Chicago, Charles Muir Lovell lives and works in New Orleans. He holds an MFA from Central Washington University and a BS in photography from East Texas State University. Lovell began photographing as a young man traveling throughout Europe and South America. He continued his photography practice during his twenty-plus years as a museum director/curator, a career that took him from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest and Deep South, everywhere finding distinctive cultures and photography subjects.

Lovell has long been passionate about photographing people within their cultures. Upon moving to New Orleans in 2008, he began documenting the city’s second line parades, social aid and pleasure clubs, and jazz funerals, capturing and preserving for posterity a unique and vibrant part of Louisiana’s rich cultural heritage. An earlier series based on religious processions in Mexico, El Favor de los Santos, was a Rockefeller Foundation–supported international traveling exhibition. It resulted in "Art and Faith in Mexico," a book published in 1999.

Lovell's photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, are found in several permanent collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Historic New Orleans Collection. Lovell has also developed a series of photographs called Language of the Streets that he began in Venice, Italy, while an artist in residence at the Emily Harvey Foundation in 2006–2007. He returned to Venice for a second residency in the fall of 2015 and is scheduled to return in 2021. He continued this series in Naples, Paris, Mexico City, New Orleans, and New York City.