Category: HW1: Finding Your Voice (Page 2 of 3)

1 – Dawoud Bey is a photographer known for his depictions of Black life. He started his career with street photography in the 1970s, in which he showed Black people going about their lives, with a deep sense of “interiority”, meaning he tried to show the people’s inner lives just as much as their external realities. He is now more known for his series’ on reimagining history. One such series is about depicting landscapes that were a part of the Underground Railroad, which was a network of paths from the Southern United States to the Northern U.S. that slaves traversed in secret to attain freedom. This series is a reimagining of the histories of people who were liberating themselves. One of my favorite photos he made is from 1990, called A Couple in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY, shown below. I like this photo because it shows a romance in such a stark way, with two people embracing, and such distinct expressions on their faces. It makes me wonder what each of them is thinking and how they feel about their relationship.

2 – Carrie Mae Weems is a photographer celebrated for her Kitchen Table Series, which she made in 1990. She has said that the series started out of her need to find her voice. She chose to photograph scenes from her life around the table in her kitchen at that time. She started the series to be a very personal one, but she ultimately wanted it to transcend her life and relate to all women’s lives. She focused on the domestic kitchen space very intentionally, as it is the site of battle around family and monogamy, and the battle between the sexes. She used the traditional domestic space to create dialogue around all those themes. One of my favorite photos from this series of hers is the first one, shown below, which depicts her sitting at her kitchen table with a mirror in front of her, and a man draped over her shoulders, his face obstructed. I like it because I relate to it completely. It shows how in many women’s lives, as they consider themselves there is always the specter, the presence, the burden of a man. In our heteronormative culture, women are expected to live their lives in relation to a man, via courtship, marriage etc, and that pressure is ever present, draped over her shoulders. I’ve always related more to women’s stories and perspectives, because I am gay. I want a male lover, and so I relate to this desire and burden of men.

3 – I think these two artists approaches are different, in the sense that Dawoud Bey turned his lens on other people outside of himself to say what he wanted to say as an artist, while Carrie Mae Weems photographed herself as a way to express what she wanted to. And I think that photography is a powerful way to “re-shape the world” because it allows artists to reveal different facets of their subjects’ identities, which can help them to amplify their perspective as they go about their lives.

Photography provides an interesting path for Dawoud Bey. Bey started out as a street photographer and since the 1970’s has used photography as a way to ground the viewer with the reality that is/was within the photo; highlighting the humanity and emotion the subject has within the environment around them. Bey suffers from severe hearing loss and uses this disadvantage to emphasize his voice in the works that he produces. Bey has held an interest in showing his audience a perspective beyond the camera by introducing topics of the past in present times. In 2013, Bey had looked into the disaster of the Birmingham church bombing of 1963 and had applied his own view towards the depiction of the victims. Bey had taken 2 portraits for each victim: one photo of a child the same age as the victim and another photo of an adult which depicts how old they would have been today. Mentioned in an interview with PBS, Bey had became interested with the idea of visualizing the past and reproducing it within the contemporary moment. His direction with this project was to bring to light the effects violence has had within a marginalized community. This photo (1) is part of Bey’s “Birmingham Project” and shows what the victim could have looked like if they were alive today on the left as well as the age they were on the day of.

Carrie Mae Weems uses photography to define developing her own voice with “The Kitchen Table Series” by telling what needed to exist. Using the environment around her, she was able to define a voice and need for African American women and women overall through a series of photography that grounds the events that unfold in a particular part of the home under one source of light. Weems vision re-imagines the definition of a kitchen table and the family surrounding it through conversation of space, family, and gender and the various battles within these topics. Weems also brings the question of altering the social contract through this series. This series serves as not only a conversation of the subjects and the topics within the photo but also as a conversation between the viewer within someone else’s household. There are photos in this project that feel more familiar than others and capture the idea that is the self and relationships through the variation of space and objects both present and absent. This photo (2) is part of Weems “The Kitchen Table Series” and shows the relationship of a woman and stress.

The works of these two artists are similar with the idea that they seek to re-imagine what reality means to an ever-progressing society. The difference between their definitions lie in the capturing of the moment. Bey brings forth time and events from the past and applies his own direction by taking photos of what was and could have been. Whereas Weems encapsulates the time spent in the home that remains universal to almost any family. The power of photography starts with capturing the moment but progresses with the idea of preserving a memory. It is a tool that anybody in the world has access to. But it takes consideration to transform a photo into a moment that re-defines what the world may already know.

Photography had great personal meaning for Dawoud Bey and the camera was a way for him to have a voice in the world. Being someone with hearing loss, Bey sees and notices more than most people, therefore, the usage of photography allows him to express his ideas and voice them through his eyes. One of his projects, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, Bey extended his view into the past and focused on a radical re-imagining of history while specifically focusing on that of the Underground Railroad. These photographs were dark and mysterious, in hopes of placing the viewer in the eyes of fugitive slaves that were moving in the woods and landscapes surrounded by darkness. It was to show the audience how the feeling would have been like, having to navigate through unfamiliar land to freedom. This photograph below in particular, was taken in a spot overlooking Lake Erie. Bey explained that while he was in this location, he knew he had come to something important. He didn’t have to hope to feel some type of authenticity in the area so that he could get a connection in the photographs, instead, he actually felt a very strong presence once he got there. It was unlike other sites he had been to and Bey was well aware that this wasn’t an imagined feeling, that it was an actual location related to his project on the Underground Railroad.

In her body of work, The Kitchen Table Series, Carrie Mae Weems captures all the photographs in one spot being her own kitchen, with one light source hanging over her kitchen table. She wanted to dive into the sense of what would be a voice for African American women, or women in general, in a “space of domesticity that have historically belonged to women”. Weems puts out the question, “how do we begin to alter the domestic space, the social living arrangement, the social contract, how does that get changed?” She questions the relationship and connection of one another, of how life can be complex but has to still be adjusted to. This project captures moments and memories at that table, displaying “the battle around the family”, mainly focusing on a woman’s life as a friend, a wife, a lover, a mother, and an individual. Each scene and moment is around this kitchen table, which is stereotypical and generally tied to being a woman’s domain. In this photograph below, there are two individuals captured and being in the center of the image and under the lighting, the woman sitting down is the one telling the story. We can feel the sense of stress and emotion on her face, a feeling of being bareness and vulnerability. It’s something that she doesn’t usually show around her husband or children but being with another fellow woman, she has the chance to express herself without the tensions of holding a role. This woman seems to be having her hair taken care of by her friend, showing us that she also needs to be looked after by another, not just a one-way role when she typically tends for her family. She’s also sitting in the center chair, with usually is left for the male figure to be seated, thus, shows that in this situation, she’s the main character of the moment being taken.

The approaches of “finding your voice” that Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems delivers can be similar and different. They both use photography as a tool to capture moments that people can relate to. In a sense, they use the photographs as a memory of an event that can be historical or can still be contemporary, but both being something that has happened in someone’s life. Picking out the differences, Dawoud Bey captures moments from what happened a long time ago, within the eyes of people who have been affected to a great extent. He uses this idea of a voice to allow the audience to experience what changed many people’s lives. Carrie Mae Weems, on the other hand, tends to capture moments that can be reoccurring to the present day, while still displaying a relatable connection to a more narrowed audience, being women.

Dawoud Bey shaped his career around his ability to see the world differently than most people. Being hearing impaired, he finds his voice through his photography. He does this by looking into the past and making moments of self-liberation resonate with the modern audience. He also has a deep interest in wanting to describe the black subject in a way that is as complex as the experiences of anyone else.  Bey expressed that he wanted to reshape the world one person at a time, his goal is to make his work a transformative experience, giving each viewer something they didn’t have before.
In his exhibition titled The Birmingham Project, Dawoud Bey presented a series of portraits commemorating the victims lost during the 1963 bombing by the KKK on the Baptist church in Birmingham Alabama. The series comprised of two portraits side by side. The subjects in the photographs represented the young victims at the age they were at their death, and how old they would be if they were still alive today. Dawoud Bey chose Birmingham residents to be his models for this photoshoot. The black and white portraits mirror each other in a way to help connect the different realities imagined here.

Carrie Mae Weems sought to be a voice for women, not just African American women. The Kitchen Table Project was a series of photographs all taken from the same place looking over Carrie Mae Weems’ kitchen table with a single hanging light and the table itself being the only constants in these photos. Each photo gives the viewer a different frozen moment in a time in this woman’s life. There are deep emotions and memorable moments captured. She explains everyday battles of life are played out in the space before the camera. She asks herself “how do we begin to alter the social living arrangement” and she answers with her photography. She examines the power dynamic between domestic relationships, her friends, and her children. This photo is the 10^th in her Kitchen Table series. Three women appear to be enjoying a humorous conversation over drinks and a cigarette. With Carrie appearing in focus and her two friends moving and blurring in this photo it almost implies a moment of introspection for Carrie, like she’s thinking about the truth behind what she just said that made her friends laugh.

The two photographers are different in that Dawoud takes portraits of others to portray a true historical past whereas Carrie takes artistic and idea-challenging scripted photographs where she is the model. Photography has the power to shape the world because it gives us the gift of being able to present and view a different reality. However they are similar in that they are both trying to preserve history that is important to them. Capturing moments in time is imperative to preserve history and shape the world for the better by challenging old ideas and being informed of our past.