Weekly Selfie 1 - Kitchen Table Series

Carrie Mae Weems “Kitchen Table Series” 

This image from Carrie Mae Weems’ “The Kitchen Table Series” stood out to me the most because it reminded me of when I was younger. It made me reflect on times when my mother would fix my hair at the kitchen table before school every morning. The black and white image made it seem as more of a glance at the past or as a memory. 

Susan Sontag “On Photography”

Sontag talks about how photographs are not just images, but also physical objects. They have this tangible quality that we can hold and touch. It’s like they become these little windows into the past that we can keep with us. This idea stood out to me the most because I never thought of an image in that way.

“To collect photographs is to collect the world. 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.”

“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.”

“Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems' Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”’, Jacqui Palumbo

The “Kitchen Table Series” is such a raw and real portrayal of life. Weeks has an amazing ability to turn the ordinary into something profound as Palumbo highlights in his article. The series speaks volumes about gender roles, power dynamics, and love all set at the kitchen table. It’s like she’s inviting us into these personal spaces to reflect on our own experiences. 

“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.”

“Weems 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.”

“How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making”, Megan O’Grady

Megan O’Grady really brings light to the genius of Carrie Mae Weems. Weems’ work is a game-changer in how it challenges the norms of image-making and storytelling. Her ability to weave narrative, historical reference, and personal journal into her photographs is revolutionary in itself. It’s interesting how Weems uses her art to shed light on important issues and provoke thought and conversation. 

“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.

“In “The Kitchen Table Series,” Weems stares out at us in a way that insists we not simply look at her but really see her — a charged exchange, but also a beautifully leveling one: Here we are, human to human, across the table from one another. She plays a character: friend, parent, breadwinner, lover, a woman who resists classification, a woman of the world, of political conscience.”