Weekly Selfie I - |Kitchen Table Series|

 

Carrie Mae Weems "Kitchen Table Series"

The photo I captured was inspired by Carrie Mae Weems's photo from her "Kitchen Table Series", 1990. The piece I chose to reference was the photograph of her at the kitchen table with a little girl as they both sit and do their makeup. Furthermore, instead of makeup, I incorporated doing my hair which is one of my interests. Weems photo represents a daughter imitating her mother as she gets dolled up and it just reminded me of the times that I would watch and learn from my mom as she did hair. I represented that in this photo as the black and white color added a sense of nostalgia as I braided my hair alone from learning from my mom.

Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”- Jacqui Palumbo

“But it was also a seminal moment for Black representation in art, influencing an entire generation of artists who rarely saw their own selves reflected back on museum walls. Still, the series is not limited to a particular perspective. ”

"Black artists is considered to be about Blackness. Unlike work that’s made by white artists, which is assumed to be universal at its core.”

From reading this article I gathered that Weems wanted her artwork to not be seen as just black art but art. Being creative without a label based on her race but also create a space where her fellow and upcoming black artists are comfortable. 

"How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making"- NY Times

"But by the 1980s, fueled in part by Laura Mulvey’s landmark 1975 essay on gaze, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” art was in a more reflexive mode, and Weems was exploring her own sense of herself in relation to a visual culture in which black women scarcely appeared at all. "

"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. "

This article by the New York Times, shows how hard it was for women to be taken seriously in the art world and not seen as an objects. Carrie Mae wanted to change the narrative through the Kitchen Table Series on the expected job of a woman in the kitchen but create different views and owning her body and life. 

Susan Sontag's excerpt from On Photography

"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."

Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art."

These two quotes that I chose from Sontag's article describe how many people thought that photographs weren't actual art until they created their own lane. I do believe that being able to capture moments in a certain way is a work of art on its own and with the growth of technologies, photos have evolved tremendously.