Weems, Women, and Worries Essay

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Mae Weems

The 1965 Moynihan Report was not the first government report to blame blacks for the very factors that condition their lives. It would be lovely if it were the last such report, but it won't be. An unintended contribution of the Moynihan report was it articulated precisely what Americans thought at the time -- put the biases down in black and white, plain as day. The instability of black families was the cause (as if anyone really knew what that word meant) of the "deterioration" of African-American life. Carrie Mae Weems had been using photography to tell racial narratives for five years, since the time when she received her first camera as a gift at the age of 20. This story of black family life was counterpoint to the Moynihan report, again in black and white, with an accompanying oral history of the quotidian life of Weems's own multigenerational family.

Using the stereotypical currency of the Moynihan Report, Weems addressed prejudice head on. The Moynihan Report was a maze of statistics and tables and indexes -- easy enough for the uninitiated to loose their way. In contrast Weems's next bodies of work were a clear trail of breadcrumbs back to the source of "the deterioration" -- a long, continuous history of racism. She took studio photographs of models behaving in stereotypical fashion, such as her "Black Man Holding Watermelon." Weems constructed still-life arrangements of tchotchkes with racial themes, including salt-and-pepper shakers painted to look like Mammy and Sambo or a figure of a uniformed bell captain. An in-your-face exhibit held in 1989-90 featured portraits of black children photographed in the style of mug shots, all tinted with monochromatic color evoking consideration of the skin-color variation of black people that is also associated with social hierarchical status by those who have internalized such racial distinctions.

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Some of Weems's strongest evidentiary work was when she chronicles the racial argument of Louis Agassiz, the scientist from Harvard who attempted to prove his ill-begotten theory of blacks as an inferior and separate race. The photographs are presented as "evidential specimens, nothing more," and were all taken from found sources, in particular the 1850 archive of daguerreotype images from South Carolina of African-born black slaves. Women figure prominently in these photographs, largely because of the many different roles that female slaves played in their captive lives. For women more than men, the functional lines between black slaves and the lowest class whites blurred. Black women worked within a quasi-intimate ecosystem that permitted entry into the private realm of the households were they were enslaved. The bare-breasted women in the daguerreotype images are objectified in ways that the men are not. Because of this, the inclusion of the women in the series seems a feminist narrative. It undeniably is, but the photos are also inalterably conflated with the encompassing racial narrative. Weems created a timeless quasi-anthropological pictorial essay with the capacity to be fresh for each subsequent exhibit.

Weems is known for provoking critical social insight of the American experience, through her conceptual installations, documentary photographs, and videos. She was granted a "genius" grant in 2013 by the MacArthur Foundation for the way she unites her aesthetic mastery with activism. With the new traveling retrospective that opened in the fall of 2013 at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and fittingly ended at the Guggenheim in New York City, Weems has had some time to consider how she is perceived as an artist and a photographer:

"People frame my work in terms of race and gender and don't integrate it into broader historical questions, and I think….....

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