Carrie Mae Weems, The Kitchen Table Series, 1990
Carrie Mae Weems inspired me to recreate the picture with her and the little girl putting on makeup. I attempted to recreate the image by having my makeup products and a mirror in front of me and tried to include my lamp. In an interview with Carrie Mae Weems, she said "it started in a curious way as kind of a response to my own sense of what needed to happen, not simply a voice for African American women, but what would be a voice, more generally, for women". The picture symbolizes that women should feel empowered, and have comfortability in their own homes to embrace who they are even as young girls. Women should be comfortable in their own skin with how they look, and how they feel.
Quote, Reference: Carrie Mae Weems: "The Kitchen Table Series" | Art21 "Extended Play". (n.d.). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPDInpNoO50
Susan Sontag's excerpt from On Photography: Susan Sontag. (n.d.). The Susan Sontag Foundation. https://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml
Quote:
· “Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experiences captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.”
Responses:
- This quote stuck out to me because pictures capture experiences from that moment even if it’s from the past it makes it modern to the eyes that are looking at it. Pictures tell a story. There might be so much going on in the picture without the person looking at knowledge. The person that is looking at the picture currently might not know the events that occurred before that picture. The camera is what captures all of that in an insistence.
Quote:
· “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”
Responses:
- This statement stands out as well because photography is not so much a statement about the world that it is a snapshot of it. They are little events taken on the camera you can make or create your own, or even purchase. Pictures create little moments that are happening in your life as I would like to say souvenirs.
Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”: Susan Sontag. (n.d.). The Susan Sontag Foundation. https://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml
Quote:
· “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.”
Response:
- In Carrie Mae Weems’s series, she mainly uses women of color because they aren’t portrayed very often in photography around the time, she was doing this and she wanted them to be portrayed, but she mentions that not only women of color that go through any of this it’s all women. All people. It is not just about a specific race that goes through the message she was trying to get through to the audience.
Quote:
· “Weems’s black-and-white photographs are like mirrors, each reflecting a collective experience: how selfhood shifts through the 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.”
Response:
- This quote stood out to me because, In Weems' black-and-white photographs, we see a collective experience reflected in each one how people suddenly distance themselves from one another, what roles women take on and change; how life emerges from our tiny space in the world, from that one tiny room so many changes from the inside of your house to the outside world so many events change and so many things get viewed differently outside and inside your comfort zone which is your house.
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