Susan Sontag On Photography
1. “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.”
- I enjoyed the allegory of Plato’s cave, especially because I think I have referenced it before here. It is a powerful allegory because it describes not only the moment in which the photo was discovered, but really the moments that would follow as men continued to “descend from the darkness” of the metaphorical cave. As in learning more about trade and turning it into an art, and in turn learning about ourselves and the world around us. In other ways even, becoming a master of reality and depicting it the way one or a group can see it.
2. “Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”
- I believe what Sontag is referencing here specifically when she uses the term aggression, is really the act of acquisition, or taking, from another. This is because photography can oftentimes cause a split in the experience, in that only one party can view the other after that moment given in time. I agree with Sontag to an extent, but I do wish I had a basis to move forward because within my time in art therapy, I noticed that photography is not the same as other mediums. In other words, it is aggressive. & in a way outside of what Sontag references, but not entirely photography can serve as expression, as a collection of evidence, in some ways even therapeutic, but it plays with power.
Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series” by Jacqui Palumbo for Artsy
1. “The resulting body of work became “The Kitchen Table Series” (1990), both a landmark in Weems’s career and in the lives of others. “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met in the art world—artists, curators, dealers—that point to ‘The Kitchen Table Series’ as the one piece that made them know they wanted to be…in the arts,” said Elisabeth Sann, a director at Jack Shainman Gallery, which is currently exhibiting the series in an online viewing room.”
- This is interesting to me because I think that at a first glance, it’s easy to judge the pieces and perhaps find them simple. Until, you realize that you can almost create your own narrative and have your own dialogues with her pieces, and it is her relatability in her works that is what really reaches to her audience. The art is not only in the product, but also in the process. She found her process in common crossroads with others, creating something out of her own space that she would normally live in, as well as inviting others to partake with her to create greater narratives that extend beyond her kitchen, and even the viewer’s.
2. “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. “I think [the series is] important in relationship to Black experience, but it’s not about race,” Weems told W magazine in 2016. “I think that most work that’s made by 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.” “Everyone can relate to this work,” Sann said. “It’s not just Black women; it’s white women, Asian women. 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.””
- By being you, you represent not only yourself, but as an artist, people who can relate and see themselves through a similar lens. In other words, in representing yourself, you end up representing the group as a whole, your community, and your background. All who came before you to be who you are. The harder it is to be yourself, regardless of what that entails such as race, gender, sexual preferences and more, the more important it ultimately is for you to stand as you are. I enjoy Weems’ perspective as well, as she is positively womanist. In that she highlights the big picture of her art is that we all come from a woman, we have a mother, we all have that memory of someone brushing your hair or bringing a homemade meal to the table. & that in simple terms, we are connected by not the big things that make up our human condition, but the small, hidden yet common details maybe even more so.
NY Times: How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making
1. “If there’s a bitter irony in the way in which historically white museums have turned to socially engaged black artists to help solve their problems — asking the victim, in essence, to become their savior — Weems has responded with characteristic optimism. Her “convenings,” which she held at the Guggenheim during her retrospective (mordantly named “Past Tense/Future Perfect”) and more recently at the Park Avenue Armory, suggest that keeping the old model while simply swapping out the content isn’t going to work. 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.””
-This is important because ultimately, if art spaces are going to benefit from black artists, they need to be able to benefit black artists back to the same extent if not more. Since truly, they don’t exist without their art or their artists. & they will not continue to exist if they do not work to represent the communities they exist in and their artists in ways that matter. It is not only about money or exposure, but about continuing to create that space that is able to reflect the community. & it needs to begin by allotting more opportunities to do so.
2. “Photography can enslave and revictimize, Weems has shown us; it can also, potentially, set us free from our inherited bias and expectations. A 2006 Rome Prize from the American Academy made possible a line of work called “Roaming,” challenging the idea that an African-American artist couldn’t have international resonance: Looking at Weems’s ghostly alter ego dressed in black outside historic sites in the Italian capital, one wonders who could possibly better understand the architectures of power. In “The Museum Series” (2005-6), the spectral figure appears again outside the Louvre, the Pergamon and the Tate Modern, the kinds of institutions that, feeling their authority increasingly in question, now call upon Weems to tell them how they might remain relevant. The figure — a testament to exclusion, longing for admission — challenges the idea of art made by white men as being the only art in Western culture capable of speaking to our common humanity.”
-In reference to my statement earlier about photography being aggressive, I think it can also stand here. Not only aggressive in its ability to objectify, to assign a character and a narrative, but to also be used in an act of defense against being used in such a way.
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