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PHOTOGRAPHS
Weems, Carrie Mae
U.S. (1953 - )
Untitled (from the Sea Islands series)
1992
Chromogenic color (Ektacolor) print
20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm) exposed image size; 21 x 17 x 1 1/2 in. (53.3 x 43.2 x 3.8 cm) frame size; 20 x 96 in. (51 x 243.8 cm) installed size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company
FA 97.185.2

For this photographic triptych, Carrie Mae Weems (U.S., born 1953) sourced images from historical photographs of an enslaved woman named Drana. Shifting the scale, color, and formatting of images originally intended for use as mechanisms of racial classification and subjugation, Weems has created an homage that addresses the dehumanizing history carried in the subject’s body and her image.
The nineteenth-century daguerreotypes that Weems used as source material were taken by Joseph Zealy at the request of Louis Agassiz, a Harvard University professor of Swiss origin, whose research sought to prove the racist belief—now completely discredited by science—that humans were not one species, but several and therefore biologically divisible into a hierarchy. To support his ideas, Aggasiz collected images of enslaved people in South Carolina, not far from the Sea Islands.
This untitled triptych is part of Weems’ Sea Islands series, which explores the African heritage of the Gullah community residing along the South Carolina and Georgia coast. By including these historical images of Drana in this series about a contemporary culture, Weems both asserts the continuing importance of the past and opens history for reconsideration and rectification in the present.
-- Label copy by Henry Art Gallery


Black Women’s Lives Matter
How do we confront the vicious history of institutionally sanctioned racism in the United States? Carrie Mae Weems shows us one way in this triptych.
The durability of slavery and the long period of racial violence that followed were premised on the perceived superiority of the white race. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, race was thought of as a biological concept—rather than the social construction that it is—and academics such as Louis Agassiz deployed scientific visual “evidence” to construct a false story about white racial supremacy and African American inferiority. Photographs of African Americans were used to advance Agassiz’s racist agenda that African Americans were physically different from whites and thus undeserving of equal personhood.
Weems uses the photographs for a different purpose. This is no longer a story about how a mad scientist and the toxic culture he reinforced tried to dehumanize black subjects. In Weems’s masterful hands, this becomes a story about how black women see themselves and our complicity (or silence) in allowing their bodies to be harmed. The two beautiful, monochromatic blue-tinted, round photographs flanking the central image ask viewers: What do we see when we look through a black woman’s eyes? How does our understanding of citizenship, race, and power change when we shift the perspective of the watcher from a white male to a black woman? How do these women on the sides, both profile portraits of Drana, view the woman in the middle? Finally, in the central black and white photograph, Drana is looking at us, instead of we, at her. It feels as if the viewer is responsible for her indecent objectification. It’s not Drana who should feel shame; it’s American society, for allowing this treatment to occur.
For me, this is a piece that probes how art can be a tool of resistance; but ultimately, this is also a piece about the importance of shifting the lens in our understandings of freedom and justice in this country. In modern parlance, Weems is asserting that black women’s lives matter.
-- Label copy by Megan Ming Francis, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Washington

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