Weekly Selfie 1 - Dalenys Drougas

 

Dalenys Drougas, No Table/Desk/Light, 2024

Carrie Mae Weems, Kitchen Table Series, 1990

From Susan Sontag excerpt from On Photography

• "What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. 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."

I chose this quote because it made me think and it feels very true. When you hear an incredible description of an event it can really make you feel like you were there, but something someone creates is just their interpretation of it. But when you get a photo or video of something it shows exactly what happened.

• "Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it." "A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture."

I picked two very similar quotes for the second one because I feel they go together very well. I feel like these quotes really point to the idea that seeing is believing, so when you see a photograph of something it proves that it really existed. I think for a lot of human history this was the case with some exceptions like the Cottingley Fairies, which are photos taken by two British cousins of fairies made of cardboard, but some people at the at time believed they were real including Arthur Conan Doyle. Now though with digital photo editing and AI things get more tricky, as even though now there are tells to know if an image is fake or not, as it improves it will be harder and harder to tell.

From Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”

• "Though her output is multifaceted, Weems has continued to return to the “muse” figure first introduced in the intimacy of the kitchen—a woman who stands in for all women, guiding viewers through antebellum Louisiana or the vast exteriors of famous museums. “This woman can stand in for me and for you; she can stand in for the audience, she leads you into history. She’s a witness and a guide,” Weems told fellow photographer Dawoud Bey..."

Art that has a figure you can place yourself in the position of is in my opinion easier to relate to because there is a clear entry point to understanding the art. So you can either put yourself in the place of the woman, or if you are unable to put yourself in the place of a woman, any woman you know, though I'm not sure that works as well.

• "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."

I enjoy the Kitchen Table Series because of how each photo is like a window into someone else's life, but it's true they're also like a mirror because like it said in the last quote you can see yourself in her or maybe any of the other figures in the series. So through this series you can see pieces of someone's life that you can relate to.

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

• "Photography can enslave and revictimize, Weems has shown us; it can also, potentially, set us free from our inherited bias and expectations."

Like most art, photography can be used for good or bad. The message someone is trying to convey, the way it is conveyed, and how people interpret the art can all effect what impact the art has in the world. So while some art can have negative impact, the first example that comes to mind is old propaganda. But there's also a lot of art including photography that can have a profoundly good impact on the world, the first thing that comes to mind for a good example is Lewis Hine's photos of child labors which changed people's view of things and led to child labor laws.

• "“I always had an exercise in self-portraiture in my classes. Invariably, all of the female students were in some way covered. They were always slightly behind the thing, whether it was their hair or an object or a piece of clothing,” she says, raising her hands in a gesture of coy femininity to her face. “They were always sort of hidden. They were never square. They were always doing something to obscure the clarity of themselves. Because women were always sort of interested in being objects, because we’ve been trained to be objects. We’ve been trained to be desirous in some sort of way, to present ourselves in that sort of way.”"

I see myself in her students mostly because I have a hard time taking photos of myself sometimes though I'm not completely sure if that is because if a desire to stay hidden or a dislike of taking photos of people in general, even in my own photography none of it intentionally includes a person unless someone asks, and that's really only been my mother. The only time I really take photos of myself is to try to document a moment but that has shifted, my most commonly documented moments are when I see theatre, a popular type of picture to take is of the playbill you get. When I was a teenager even though at that time I hated pictures of myself more then I do now that picture was of the playbill covering part of my face, but now I've removed myself entirely and the backdrop of the playbill is the theatre curtain.