Weekly Selfie 1- Kristina

 Susan Sontag  On Photography

Quote: “To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.”

-What I like about collecting photographs is how it serves memories that we can look back on. Sometimes it is hard to remember every detail of a particular event or happenings.  Photographs is easily accessible specially nowadays it most photographs are digitalized.

Quote: While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency.

-What I understand in this quote is that photography is seen as what “it is” photographs shows reality captured. There is a different feel of a painting or prose compared to photographs since the painter can give different essence to an image.

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

Quote: “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.”

-Weems' photography series captures moments from her everyday life; whether it be a mundane moment, it makes the viewers feel a sense of familiarity or connection. 

Quote: “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.”

-As the quote from above mentions, the series really reflects a collective experience. The series highlights motherhood and being a partner, and just by being herself.

How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making

Quote: “Photography can enslave and revictimize, Weems has shown us; it can also, potentially, set us free from our inherited bias and expectations.”

-Images can be exploited or misrepresented, reinforcing stereotypes. However, photography also has the power to challenge and change these biases, offering new perspectives and revealing hidden truths to broaden our understanding.

Quote: The desire to create images has never not felt powerful, something Weems understood from the first time she held her own camera.

- I could relate to this feeling. When I first started drawing as a child, I knew I might pursue art in the future. I had a strong desire to keep creating drawings, and as a teenager, I began doing graphic design, which inspired me to make it my major today.

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled from 'The Kitchen Table Series (1990)

Kristiana Zulaybar, Study (2024)

This image inspired me because it reminded me of asking help for my mom on my homework when I was little.