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Carrie Mae Weems

In the mid 90s Carrie Mae Weems (recent MAN interview) "was invited by The J. Paul Getty Museum to comb through their photography collection. She selected from nineteenth and twentieth century photographs of black men and women, from the time they were forced into slavery in the United States to the present, then rephotographed the pictures, enlarged them, and toned them in red. Each photograph is framed under a sheet of glass inscribed with a text written by the artist, evoking the layers of prejudice imposed on the depicted men and women. Weems's work offers a contemporary reading of this historical group of images." (MoMA link)

In this series of appropriated images she aims to 'heighten critical awareness' and give the subjects a dignity and humanity they were denied by their white American photographers.  Unfortunately two of the images she has chosen to include are arguably mis-appropriated, one by Robert Frank (Swiss) and another by Garry Winogrand.

Frank was a post-war humanist photographer and the image of the black woman holding a white baby is from his book The Americans. This seminal book was such a sweeping indictment of the impoverishment and inequality he had witnessed in America that it was met with barely concealed contempt on its release in the US. But in Weem's graceless, clumsy effort to recontextualise his anonymised photograph Robert Frank is literally dis-credited.

Frank had exposed the fraud behind the dream of a contented and affluent America typically disseminated in most magazine photography - his successors would take an even more cynical view.  And Garry Winogrand was an even easier target for Weems, after all he had been accused by Victor Burgin of racism for his photograph of a mixed race couple holding monkeys in the zoo (a favourite location for Winogrand who regularly took his kids there).  How else could it be interpreted, is the challenge.  Winogrand was provocative in a way that perhaps only his NY contemporary Diane Arbus was more capable of, both operating on their own terms and off the right-on grid.  His vision was consistently sceptical and as a result he was mistrusted and routinely misinterpreted.  He anticipated the reaction to this photograph and while perhaps many would not even have risked exhibiting it he was quick to point the finger back at the academics who denounced it - the racist reading is an indictment of the reader and of society.  Winogrand was drawn to photography on the back of Frank's book and there is no doubt that he was familiar with the Frank picture and at one level his is a spontaneous re-iteration of the earlier work.

When Weems copied, resized, tinted, matted and anonymised Frank and Winogrand's photographs and added them to her collection of race images from the history of photography she not only diminished and misrepresented their contribution but, ironically, in generalising and dehumanising them, she displays the same kind of narrow, lazy prejudice that she herself is so sensitive to.