MacArthur Awards - 2013

The 2013 cohort of MacArthur Award winners has been announced and includes two people whose work I very much admire - photographer/artist Carrie Mae Weems and pianist/composer Vijay Iyer.

Guardian Photo Critic Misses the Importance of Black & White

Green Warehouse, 1978. Photograph © William Christenberry.

Palmist Building (Winter), Havana Junction, Alabama 1981.

Photograph © William Christenberry.

Sean O'Hagan is at it again. The photo critic at The Guardian has this review of a newly opened exhibition entitled "Myth, Manners and Memory: Photographers of the American South" (slide show here) in which he discusses work by Walker Evans, William Christenberry, Eudora Welty, William Eggleston, Carrie Mae Weems, Susan Lipper and Alec Soth. Fine photographers all. But the following statement brought me up short:

"Weems, the most political photographer here, confronts the turbulent racist history of the American south, placing herself in a series of resonant locations and contrasting the barbarity of slavery with the refined social etiquette that held sway among rich plantation families."

Oh, and did he forget to mention Weems is the only African-American photographer he planned to to discuss? So, the fact that Weems makes race evident (meaning she explicitly makes it central to her work), while all the white folks (here not just the photographers, but apparently, the curators of this show) apparently "don't" do so is political? Why is it not political that the white photographers (mostly) focus elsewhere - or are least seen to do so? I'd put the stress on this last phrase because they don't really.

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, for instance, James Agee (Evans's co-conspirator) explicitly talks about why they are not going to address race - and then offers pointed vignettes demonstrating the cruelty of race relations in Alabama circa 1937. And, after all, do the white folks in Lipper's "Grapevine series" not play a role in, or suffer the consequences of, the peculiar way race works and has worked in the South?* Do they have no race? What about this image by Alec Soth? Does it plumb racial themes?

Jimmie's Apartment , Memphis, Tennessee, 2002.
Photograph © Alec Soth.

Who is that in the photos clipped and taped to the back of the closet door? Do those images contrast with the shabby apartment in any way? And did Memphis figure in "the turbulent racial history of the American south"? Is it, perhaps, a "resonant location"? By and large, I find O'Hagan's photo criticism wacky - and I don't mean that in a good way. I've said that several times here before. In this instance, I wonder what he was thinking when he looked at this exhibition.
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* And, of course, race is an American problem, not one just for the South or just for blacks.

Carrie Mae Weems (at UofR)

A novel and welcome turn of events occurred at my University this year. The administration (headed by a new president and an even newer dean) funded a "Humanities Project" that has turned out well enough that they renewed funding. The University is heavily orieinted toward science and engineering and the humanities have been largely neglected in the time I have been on campus (nearly a decade and a half). I will spare you the complex and contested history and simply say that I hope that this new project marks the start of an intellectual rejuvenation on campus.

For the past several weeks the College's Hartnett Gallery has been showing work by Carrie Mae Weems in an exhibition called "All About Eve." The exhibition runs through this coming Friday, March 9th.

Weems won the 2005 Distinguished Photographer Award from Women in Photography International. This piece is called "A Negroid Type / You Became a Scientific Profile / An Anthropological Debate / & A Photographic Subject" (1995-1996).

© Carrie Mae Weems

As the images she uses in this piece make clear, Weems is keenly attuned to the exigencies, both historical and contemporary, that define the intersection of race and gender in the United States. And as the title makes clear, she also is attuned to the ways that photography specifically, and representation more generally, contributes to those exigencies. You can find more of her work here.