Selfie with Carrie Mae Weems

 

Carrie Mae Weems, "Kitchen Table Series", 1990

Chinoyerem Opara, Kitchen Table, 2021

    The photo above by Carrie Mae Weems inspired me to remake one of her photos I found most interesting. In the "Kitchen Table Series" the photos describe much of the experience of a black women's selfhood. All the photos in the series tell an experience or situation which I find fascinating. I guess it is true that a photo has a million words. The photo I recreated shows to me that it is okay to be alone. She is playing cards to keep her mind awake and also drinking a glass of wine to relax. Being alone gives you the opportunity to learn more about yourself and what makes you happy.

Susan Sontag

"Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs, the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store."(

"Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern." 

Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”

"Weems’s black-and-white photographs are like mirrors, each reflecting a collective experience:...the roles that women accumulate and oscillate between; how life emanates from the small space we occupy in the world." (Palumbo.)

"Men can see the women in their lives—memories from their childhood or scenes from their marriage or their family life" (Palumbo.)

The Cindy Sherman Effect

"Sherman’s coup was to cast herself as subject matter, making each of her staged characters the star of an implicit narrative, from the lush color centerfolds that followed the “Film Stills,” in 1982, to the strangely sexualized “Broken Dolls” of the ’90s." 

"By deconstructing and reinventing portraiture, which in itself was something of a dead genre when she arrived on the scene, Sherman influenced not only photographers but also painters and performance and video artists."