“The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.” -Carrie Mae Weems
When she turned 20, her boyfriend, Raymond, a labor organizer and Marxist, gave her a camera. She said “I think that the first time I picked up that camera, I thought, ‘Oh, OK. This is my tool. This is it.’”
Carrie Mae Weems may well be the best contemporary photographer working today in the field of fine art. Her work focuses on the importance of Black women, both in life and in the photographs she produces.
Kitchen Table Series
Carrie Mae Weems seems best known for her series of photographs that take place around a kitchen table made in 1990. Each image features Carrie Mae in scenes that happen there — a woman and her daughter each with makeup, the same woman with a man smoking, a bottle of whiskey on the table between them and a woman hugging a man as he sits at the table reading a newspaper. The point of view in all of the series is the same. The camera looks along the table lit by a single overhead light. The background is a wall with a door on its right. Each photo tells a new story about the woman whose name is never mentioned in the series of untitled prints (opening photo, top row, first three images).
Historian of photography, professor at NYU, and a photographer herself, Deborah Willis says, “Weems’s photographs are ‘performing beauty’ through lighting, posing, acting and fashion. Weems confronts historical depictions and restages them with ‘what if …’ questions. In her series, “Not Manet’s Type,” Weems critiques the white male art “masters,” and how beauty is defined through their paintings” (opening photo, bottom row, first image).
Each photo has a paragraph in red on a black background describing the scene. This one says, “It was clear I was not Manet’s type. Picasso — who had a way with women — only used me & Duchamp never even considered me” (opening photo, bottom row, first image). Carrie Mae Weems often modeled for her photograph whether dressed, partially so or even nude.
Spike Lee
Time commissioned Carrie Mae Weems to photograph Spike Lee for its Aug. 20, 2018 cover that featured his new film “BlacKkKlansman” (opening photo, top row, last image).
This was not the pair’s first collaboration. Oscar-nominated Lee used three prints from the Kitchen Table Series in the background of his 2017 remake of his 1986 film “She’s Gotta Have It.”
Roaming
Her 2006 series titled “Roaming” shows Carrie Mae Weems in the foreground of places, mostly architectural icons like the entry to the Louvre in Paris (opening photo, bottom row, second image).
In an interview with Guggenheim in New York, Weems says, “Architecture, in its essence … is very much about power. If we think about a place like Rome … what one is made to feel is the power of the state in relationship to … the general populace. You are always aware that you are sort of a minion in relationship to this enormous edifice — the edifice of power … I thought, then, perhaps … I could use my own skin in a sort of series of performances. That I could use my own body as a way of leading the viewer into those spaces — highly aware — and challenging those spaces.”
The entire series is on her website at the link above. A short two-and-a-half-minute video showing more of the series is well worth the time.
Black Lives Matter
Megan O’Grady writing in the Oct. 15, 2018 issue of The New York Times Style Magazine said, “How, I ask Weems, does an artist operate within a visual culture in which videos of Black men being murdered regularly go viral — on the one hand, forcing us to witness injustice for ourselves, on the other, presenting black death with a terrible, numbing casualness?”
Weems immediately brings up Philando Castile, who was shot and killed by a Minnesota police officer in 2016 during a routine traffic stop. His girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, filmed the encounter from the passenger’s seat. “I mean, I will never understand how she was able to do that,” Weems says. “I see a deer hit, and I’m completely — I can’t do anything but just hold my head. But this is crucial. I’m always thinking, ‘How do I show this? What do I show? And how do I contextualize it?’ A camera has become more than just a journalistic or artistic tool, but a kind of weapon itself — one that reveals the truth.”
O’Grady’s question uncovers a lot about who Carrie Mae Weems is, the stories she strives to tell and the roles and worth of Black men and women.
May Flowers 2002
Carrie Mae Weems’s portfolio titled “May Days Long Forgotten” includes a round photo of three young black girls in dresses laying on the ground (opening photo, bottom row, third image). In this series, she revisits photography of the nineteenth century replacing the privileged white children with Black children to make the point that times and the empowerment of Black girls and women are changing.
This year, out of the blue, Weems received a phone call from Jessica, the young girl — now a woman — who once modeled for Weems in “May Flowers.” Jessica now has a daughter of her own, and a partner, a woman who also has a child. They’re struggling to make a go of it.
“I just decided, ‘You’re going to be the subject of a whole project. It’s just going to be you,’” says Weems. “What happens to a Black woman who is her age, who drops out of school but has ambition. Who is trying to do the right thing, who is raising children, who’s decided that she’s also gay.” For the project, Jessica will also be self-documenting, telling her own story. Weems gestures as if she’s presenting a gift, passing it on matter-of-factly. “I said, ‘Here’s a camera.’”
Catwoman
In the 2004 movie, “Catwoman,” played by Oscar-winning actor Halle Berry says to a friend, “What am I going to do with my life?” Her friend says, “Well you could always be an artist like Carrie May Weems.”
Sources: The New York Times Style Magazine, Time, The University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology.
Read inspirational stories about photographs and the photographers making them in On Photography.
