CARRIE MAE WEEMS
American
Carrie Mae Weems’s devotion to activism in the
1970s launched her career in photography during
the 1980s. When the Museum of Modern Art in-
cluded her in the exhibitionPleasures and Terrors of
Domestic Comfortin 1991, Weems’s work was al-
ready bridging issues of domestic space, constructed
identity, and the irreconcilable place called home.
Her work relates to the African Diaspora in a man-
ner that is personal, but not necessarily autobiogra-
phical. By using image and text and producing work
in series, Weems continually challenges herself and
her audience. Since 1991, her work includes room-
sized installations, involving a complex array of
mixed media that confront preconceived notions of
what a photograph can convey.
Her artistic aspirations began as a dancer with
Anna Halpern in San Francisco during the 1970s.
While participating in political demonstrations, she
realized that photography, rather than dance, do-
cumented best the social issues that were mounting
for African Americans and for women’s civil rights.
On her 21st birthday a friend bought her a camera
and shortly afterwards, she came into contact with
The Black Photographer’s Annual, a book that was
published intermittently between 1972 and 1980 by
Joseph Crawford, which introduced her to Roy
DeCarava. His street photography that chronicled
the African-American urban experience inspired
Weems. She has since talked in multiple interviews
about documentary influence in her earlier work.
I was very much interested in documentary photography
as a vehicle for expression, as a political tool. It was a
way of capturing the human condition. Documentary is
a very potent vehicle. But a photograph can be slanted.
How do you ensure that a photograph is understood
with your intended context?...All of it is open to inter-
pretations, assumptions, and opinions.
(Tarlow 1991, 11)
In her late 20s, Weems enrolled in photography at
the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), earn-
ing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1981. Courses in
literature, folklore, and writing had the greatest
influence. When she arrived at the University of Ca-
lifornia (UC), San Diego, for her M.F.A., she gra-
vitated towards photography professors who
challenged her to deal with issues of authorship, sub-
ject, context, and audience, which became found-
ational to her training. From 1984 to 1987, her
interest in African-American folklore brought her
to the Graduate Program in Folklore at UC
Berkeley. Weems compares her work to Zora Neale
Hurston, whose degree in anthropology greatly
informed her literary portrayals of African Ame-
ricans and the human experience. Weems’s academic
training has resulted in her own anthropological
treatment of photography to reveal how the domi-
nant views of the time influences a photograph’s
meaning. Nineteenth-century practices, particularly
in the human sciences of ethnography and physiog-
nomy, are thematic departures and points of recov-
ery for many of Weems’s photographic series.
FromHereISawWhatHappenedandICried(1995)
was a commission from the J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles, to respond to their nineteenth-century
photography exhibition,The Hidden Witness: Afri-
can Americans in Early Photography. The commis-
sion occurred during a time of continued healing
after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Weems
rephotographed select images from the exhibition,
such as J. T. Zealy’s ethnographic daguerreotypes
from 1850, and printed them as red c-prints with
sandblasted text on glass placed over the images.
The series declared a place of physical and histor-
ical distance, but with strong emotional ties to the
people of African descent objectified by photogra-
phy’s historical practices.
Although Weems’s documentary foundations
are particularly evident in the earliest series,Envir-
onment Portraits(1978), her folklore style was first
introduced inFamily Pictures and Stories(1978–
1984). The series of nearly 30 photographs depicted
her family in everyday environments and activities,
but the text and audio tapes extended interpreta-
tions from an autobiographical narrative to include
discussions on the complex and often violent inter-
relationships that can occur within families.Family
Pictures and Stories endures as a mature series
because it marks Weems’s ability to reconceptua-
lize cultural staples, such as the family album, to
emphasize a unified cultural character or condi-WEEMS, CARRIE MAE