Joy In the Quotidian: Reflecting on Carrie Mae Weems’s Photography

How often do we participate in our lives without reflecting or acknowledging the mundane moments? The uttering of a good morning as we walk past someone? The pouring of our coffee into a mug? These moments may seem insignificant but it is within the everyday that artist Carrie Mae Weems positioned her early photographs, those moments that seemingly have no significance. Discussing her work, she has stated that her primary concern is with the status and place of Black Americans in the United States. Although Weems has since turned her focus to the complexities of the human experience and the idea of social inclusion, her work still examines the experiences of people of color, especially Black women. Her ability to foreground these experiences gracefully and have their emotionality translate to the viewer has now been recognized with the prestigious Hasselblad Award, making Weems the first Black woman to receive the award. For an artist who has been consistently creating work since 1981 (when she produced her first series consisting of photographs, text, and spoken word performances), this is a monumental acknowledgment of her work and its contribution to the art world.

Born in 1953 in Portland, Oregon, Weems exhibited a passion and natural talent for creative expression from a young age. At the age of 12, she began participating in street theater, and at 17, she was invited to join postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin’s experimental dance group, San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop. While Weems received her first camera in 1973 as a birthday gift, her education in photography did not begin until the following year when she began attending the San Francisco City College (SFCC). She received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1981 and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1984. During this period, she began to present her work in exhibitions, including the 1984 series Family Pictures and Stories at a gallery in San Diego. This marked Weems’s first cohesive body of work and her creative introduction to the public. 

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With this series, Weems began to investigate themes that would become recurrent throughout her career. She explored the strength of familial relationships among Black Americans, a refutation of the Moynihan Report, which claimed that their families were fractured due to weak family bonds. Further, by positioning Black American women as the central subjects in her photographs, she is criticizing Moynihan’s argument that the dominant matriarchal system within Black American communities was destroying Western normative family structures. In the series, Weems also began using those with whom she had a personal connection/relationship as subjects in her photographs. 

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Family Pictures and Stories, 1981-1982. Carrie Mae Weems

 In what is perhaps her most acclaimed series, Kitchen Table Series, Weems turned the camera on herself and addressed “women’s subjectivity, women’s capacity to revel in her body, and the woman’s construction of herself, and her own image.” In the photographs, the kitchen table serves as a site for gathering, collecting the stories and the exchanges between friends and family, and bearing witness to these moments that are often overlooked. Another compelling read of Weems’ portrayal of the quotidian domestic space is that Weems is referencing the history of Black women and domesticity, disentangling it from its past connection to enslavement. By separating the kitchen from a past that saw Black women relegated to these areas of a home where they had to care for a family that was not theirs, Weems instead shares representations of kinship, love, and care. In this series, we can also see Weem’s continued criticism of the Moynihan Report through her depiction of various types of kinship as she challenges the heteronormative ideal of a family. In these images, the family is depicted by friends, neighbors, lovers, and children.

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Weems’ recent work, in which she has begun to use multidisciplinary techniques like installation and video, has resulted in projects like Slow Fade to Black, which examines the public memory of Black American women entertainers. According to Weems, it is a criticism of how these women have faded from society’s collective conscience, erasing their contributions. Weems is adept at depicting the Black American experience, representing a complex existence without relying on the lenses of violence and subjugation through which said experience is typically represented. In their release announcing Weems as this year’s winner, Hasselblad spoke of her work’s concern with the “salient issues of our time – the struggle for racial equality and human rights”. While some of her earlier work may not be viewed as activist work, I posit that by portraying Black women (and men and children) in moments of peace, care, pleasure, and joy, moments that Black women have historically been robbed of, she contributes to the dismantling of the strong Black woman myth. The strong Black woman myth advances the misconception that despite the hardships they experience, they are resilient and and will continue to support their family and friends, even at the expense of their well-being. In rescripting Black women as complex individuals she shatters the myth, underlining their varied experiences, and I would also add, highlighting the importance of community and its intrinsic value to mental health. As Weems stated when discussing the prize, with the recognition comes a continued responsibility to deliver on the promise she made to “shine a light into the darker corners of our time and thereby, with a sense of grace and humility, illuminate a path forward.” By continuing to pose questions regarding the hierarchies that govern our society through her work, Weems is creating space to champion future possibilities for Black American women.

Untitled, from The Kitchen Table Series, 1990. Carrie Mae Weems / San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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