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| A kitchen table by someone who can't even afford a real table |
Responses to the 3 articles
Susan Sontag excerpt from On Photography
“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power.”
I feel like this is something that we lightly touched upon in class when we were talking about how when we go and we are asked about a place or an event and we can picture it and “describe” it even if we haven’t been there before it holds some sort of power. There is great power in imagery in itself. But when you think about what imagery gives you, knowledge, representation, etc. you realize how much power is in it, because like it says knowledge is power.
“Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.”
One of the things talked about is how painting art and basically most non digital art can sometimes have this very opinionated aspect to them, even when inspired by reality because it is being created by the image in a person’s head, and they talk about about how photography captures the moment and you’d think there would be a lack of opinion or meaning but in reality every detail in an image effects the scenery in it, just like how Carrie Mae Weems uses a specific lighting and a darker kitchen with a specific message behind all her images. Every detail in the image means something, affects something.
Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”
“Weems’s black-and-white photographs are like mirrors, each reflecting a collective experience: how selfhood shifts through passage of time; the sudden distance between people, both passable and impassable; the roles that women accumulate and oscillate between; how life emanates from the small space we occupy in the world.”
Similar to what I said, in the quotation before, a lot of the sceneries, set up, lighting and placement of everything, and everyone in those photos is, it creates the meaning behind the story. If subtle things like lighting, changes or facial expressions change, they would affect the images that we see. All of these details Provide us with an opportunity to really understand what it means in her narrative, and what her imagination of what her life looks like. The crazy part is that even with her narrative almost everyone can see this play, whether it was women seeing themself as this person or men recognizing the women in their life in these positions, and even children can picture a female tied to a kitchen table.
“This woman can stand in for me and for you; she can stand in for the audience, she leads you into history. She’s a witness and a guide,”
This way of explaining what Weem’s does in this piece is just impactful. Because it literally is just that. Women can see themselves in these positions especially in the earlier years. Even women now can picture themselves in these confining gender roles. It is a tale so common for so many women in history, and seeing it in black and white doesn’t just affects the mood but it also makes it feel even more historic.
NY Times: How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making
“A gifted storyteller who works accessibly in text and image, she’s created new narratives around women, people of color and working-class communities, conjuring lush art from the arid polemics of identity.”
This is not just talking about her Kitchen Table Series but it is explaining some of her other works and how impactful they have been. She isn’t just telling the tales of women, she give that desperately needed representation of women of color, she is showing the reality of what it is to be a black woman, in her kitchen table series that reality was shown by her just being. She was giving out the reality that for so long had gone so unseen. It’s a lot of people's narratives and identities.
“We also both shared a sense that our very presence in the world, as human beings who were also black, demanded that we live lives and make work that somehow made a difference, that left the world transformed in some way, and that visualized a piece of that world that was uniquely ours and that participated in a larger cultural conversation inside of the medium of photography.”
Just reading this you can already see how significant it was to just be black and existing. And for Weem’s to understand that it is different for her to just be a being is something so much more different because she is black. It shifted her experiences, her desires and ultimately affects how she creates arts and represents herself and others. Her thoughts, aspirations and desires are all represented with her art. Being black, being a woman and being an artist made it clear to her what her art needed to properly represent who she is and what she stands for.
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