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Course: The J. Paul Getty Museum > Unit 2
Lesson 3: Photographers- P.H. Emerson
- P.H. Emerson's naturalistic photography
- John Humble's photographs of Los Angeles
- Camilo Vergara documents the changing urban landscape
- David Hockney's "Pearblossom Hwy"
- Eileen Cowin on her series "I See What You're Saying"
- Carrie Mae Weems on her series "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried"
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Carrie Mae Weems on her series "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried"
Combining text and photography, contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems explores the notion of a narrative within her work. Created by Getty Museum.
Want to join the conversation?
- Is the Paul Getty Museum partners with KA?(3 votes)
- I was wondering which archive she used to find the original photos? There seems to be scientific photos and then private photos. Extremely powerful images and the texts do emphasise that power.(2 votes)
- Some of the source photographs are very famous. One in particular--that of a man whose back is scarred from a whipping--has its context and history explained here: http://abhmuseum.org/2013/07/the-scourged-back-how-runaway-slave-and-soldier-private-gordon-changed-history/
Two of the others are held by the Peabody Museum at Harvard (the two men whose images are labeled by Ms Weems as "A Negroid Type" and "An Anthropological Debate") which I believe underlies her choice of labels here, since these were taken in the 1850s, at the behest of then-prominent Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, who sought to bolster his theory that "races" represented separate creations.
It is interesting how Weems makes it clear that she sees her work as transformative (through color, overlay, and text), and so much so that the credits at the end of the video are for the sources of these transformations rather than the sources of the raw photographs. Still, I think it would help the viewer to have a deeper understanding of her choices if we knew something about the photographs.(3 votes)
Video transcript
- [voiceover] Carrie Mae Weems discusses her 1995 to '96 photography series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. (sad music) - [voiceover] Power and sex, they control so much of our lives. I spent a great deal of time looking at questions of race and gender and out of that came this piece From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. You have this narrative that
runs across the entire work, images that lay out a
very specific development of history, of photographic
history in the United States and of black history in the United States. They're all of the most part
black and white photographs. I used a monochrome red, I placed mats over the top of them to obscure certain (mumbling), I add text on glass in
order to also distance the original photograph and
make clear this was something that was taken from something
else, this was lifted. (sad music) The thing that I'd learned to do that if I paid attention
to a pattern of repetition, that simple refrain of you became, you became, you became, or ha, ha, ha. (sad music) So there's three narratives
that are working simultaneously and then the individual
photographs for the most part stand alone as individual units. A narrative like you became
a scientific profile, a negroid type, an anthropological debate, a photographic subject. They're all of these
sort of singular moments that go on to make a more complex story. I suppose in a way it's like a film, the way in which film functions. (sad music) It doesn't have a single note, but it has many, it has
notes of complication and duplicity and complicity. I love the rhythm of
the text that's created that allows for the image to be amplified. (sad music)