Carrie Mae Weems Quotes

#1. I think that still, for the most part, even in 2010, the vast majority of museum shows and gallery shows and gallerists are pretty much dominated by men. So having a sense of what women are up to, for me, frankly, is very, very important.

Carrie Mae Weems

#2. I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up - you can't avoid that if you're a person of color in this country.

Carrie Mae Weems

#3. I don't like directing a lot of people. So trying to keep things really simple and elegant is my preferred way of working.

Carrie Mae Weems

#4. Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship with music, sometimes it needs all three and become a video projection.

Carrie Mae Weems

#5. 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.

Carrie Mae Weems

#6. How you get work done is by exploiting yourself and your feelings, and sometimes people get in the way.

Carrie Mae Weems

#7. Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday)

Carrie Mae Weems

#8. 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.

Carrie Mae Weems

#9. It's very important for me to really use this body as a barometer of a certain kind of knowledge
to take the personal risk of exposing my own body in a certain kind of way. I can't ask anybody else to do something that I don't do first myself.

Carrie Mae Weems

#10. 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.

Carrie Mae Weems

#11. It's fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility - this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs] ... This invisibility - this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time - is the greatest source of my longing.

Carrie Mae Weems

#12. 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.

Carrie Mae Weems

#13. 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.

Carrie Mae Weems

#14. I didnt know photography would take me to the places that it has taken me

Carrie Mae Weems

#15. My father was very interested in music, and when he and his brothers were young, they had a singing group that used to open for Sam Cooke. There was always music in our house, but there wasn't much art around.

Carrie Mae Weems

#16. I really like the structure of my body. It moves well, it looks good, it photographs well, it understands gesture and nuance.

Carrie Mae Weems

#17. I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

Carrie Mae Weems