She created a deeply felt and realistic account of Black family life in the United States.Ĭoupling her sardonic wit with the direct, uncompromising gaze of her subjects, Weems eviscerated the racism embedded in jokes made at the expense of people of color. Weems incorporated candid photographs of her family with written texts and audio recordings that documented her family’s history. This series was intended to refute the Moynihan Report, which blamed “the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society” on a weak family structure. Her “Family Pictures and Stories” 1978-1984 consisted of gelatin silver prints and audio, featuring her own Oregon family. In the 1980s, Weems turned away from documentary photography to create staged representations, which incorporated texts and narratives that dealt with racism. She was influenced by the unsentimental pictures of Harlem, taken by photographer Roy De Carava and tied her dance background to the role of the body in her own photographs. She taught at Hampshire College in Massachusetts in the late 1980s. She studied modern dance and worked as a labor organizer before she became an artist. Weems studied at Cal Arts and received her B.A.
Her photos are often oddly lit or blurred black-and-white pictures with text, one of which reads, “I sided with men so long I forgot women had a side.” Weens’s images illustrate what the viewer is reading. Weems is known for her image-and-text works in which she tells visual and verbal stories of domestic life in a picture-book style. The work of conceptual photographer Carrie Mae Weems consists of photographs and videos addressing inequities of race, gender, and social class.
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