Selfie with Carrie Mae Weems

 

     

                                         1) Carrie Mae Weem's Photo 

                                                2) My Photo 

        

                   The photographs from  Carrie Mae Weens "Kitchen Table Series" inspired me to remake one of them which were all in black and white. In this particular photo you see a mother reflecting on her daughter while sending her a message about doing homework. These particular photographers were made like mirrors each of them reflective on something very different such as selfhood and the roles of women but it also speaks about black representation in art. Carrie Mae Ween's just set a camera in her kitchen and began taking many pictures of her changing roles in her life. The black and white scheme adds the final touch as these pictures were taken back in 1990.  These photos are similar because at the time of the photo I was telling my niece to do her homework, in which sometimes I do find myself being the mother figure for my nieces when it comes to certain situations. 

Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series " - the series is not limited to a particular perspective. “I think [the series is] important in relationship to Black experience, but it’s not about race,”. 

"It’s not just Black women; it’s white women, Asian women. Men can see the women in their lives—memories from their childhood or scenes from their marriage or their family life. It’s so universal and yet representation like this is so rare.” 

Susan Sontag excerpt from On Photography - "Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations."

"While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth".

The Cindy Sherman Effect by Phoebe Hoban for ArtNews- “I think I was part of a movement, a generation, and maybe the most popular one of that movement at the time, but it probably would have happened without me,” 

"Sherman’s paradigm shift was one step ahead of technology. Her kaleidoscopic investigation of the essence of her own—and, by extension, society’s—identity complex has relied on ingenuity, not gigabytes".