Selfie with Carrie Mae Weems

 

Carrie Mae Weem, Nude, 1990

Mayra Rodriguez, "Nude", 2021

Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”

 

“She’s alone, folding into herself, a half-empty bottle of wine in front of her. She laughs with her friends, their movement leaving spectral trails across the frame. She sits with her young daughter, both hunched over their writing, resting a weary head in her hand. In the final scenes, alone, she locks eyes with the camera. She finds pleasure, and comfort, with herself.”

 

“She moves from lover to friend to mother and to herself, alone. She commands the stage—she plays a woman aware of the viewer, sometimes stealing a glance while others remain oblivious, at other times directly confronting the camera.”

 

The Cindy Sherman Effect

 

“She inspired a generation of younger artists to explore their own identities across a range of mediums.” 

 

“That’s what I see as one of her great strengths—the theatrics of camera vision. And she played it out incredibly, and then she just used that as the stepping-stone to take it further and further and further out.”

 

Susan Sontag- On Photography

 

“Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.”

 

“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”