Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weemsis an American artist who works with text, fabric, audio, digital images, and installation video but is best known for her work in the field of photography. Her award-winning photographs, films, and videos have been displayed in over 50 exhibitions in the United States and abroad and focus on serious issues that face African Americans today, such as racism, gender relations, politics, and personal identity. She has said, "Let me say that my primary concern in art, as...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
CountryUnited States of America
The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.
Art is the one place we all turn to for solace.
I emerged in that incredible moment in the 1980s when all kinds of social questions about subjectivity and objectivity, about who was making, who was looking.
In terms of digital photography, I continue to print and use film for the most part. I still shoot with film, 21/4 film specifically, and I love it. I love it because I know what it does, how it really responds to light.
It's impossible to change the social without changing the personal - you have to put your money where your mouth is. And if you're not making those challenges at home, it's unlikely you'll make them in a larger setting.
The ideas I'm working with are ideas I'm committed to. I don't know how to soft-shoe them. I don't know how to make them more palpable. I just never knew how to be one of those girls. I wish I knew how to be that sometimes, but I don't know how to be that way.