Weekly Selfie #1 - Jenelle Mejia

Carrie Mae Weems: Kitchen Table Series
 

On Photography-

“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”

Technology has given us the gift of capturing every moment. I'll remember what i was doing in high school in 10 years because of my phone. We take pictures of everything, I take pictures of everything. I have pictures of random people on my phone. It's so easy to share images with social media. This ability is beautiful, but it can also be very scary. Now it's so easy to steal somebody's artwork or have a picture of somebody we don't even know.


“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.”

The idea of taking an image, in order to own something is very intimidating. If we can take a picture of anything, then we can own anything…It also connects to artificial intelligence.


Revisiting “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.”

The kitchen table series documents moments in her life. They’re simple, yet so beautiful. She is a true story teller. The table in her series has many lives, each photograph captures a different one. We all can relate to at least one of the photos.

“she’s engaged with the world around her; she’s engaged with history, she’s engaged with looking, with being. She’s a guide into circumstances seldom seen.”

Carrie Mae Weems creates artwork for the female gaze. She uses her real life as inspiration. The kitchen table series is so good because it's real and raw. There is absolutely no filter and you feel like you're in the moment with her.

Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-

“It’s the series that made her career and inspired a new generation of artists who had never before seen a woman of color looking confidently out at them from a museum wall, and for whom Weems’s work represented the first time an African-American woman could be seen reflecting her own experience and interiority in her art.”

Her photographs give women of color permission to love who they are. She's essentially telling them, “our lives are beautiful”. Even when we are playing cards, doing our makeup, or simply smoking a cigarette it is done with grace.

“Her model, rather, is about curating a flexible, conversation-oriented space that reflects the community, in which real civic engagement might happen. She has so much more work to do, she says: “I feel like I’m racing against the clock.”

Her artwork is revolutionary. She inspires women to exist in their truth. The power of her artwork lies in the fact that it is activist. The existence of women of color is inherently activist.