House/Field/Yard/Kitchen, from the series From Here I Saw What Happened . . . And I Cried,

1995–96

<p>Weems placed text over each of these portraits. The significance of each identity, positioned at the center of the image, is made clear to the viewer immediately. However, Weems was careful not to obscure the face of any of the women, so we must confront each of their gazes as we examine the portraits. By placing the text across the glass of the frames rather than on the portraits themselves, Weems used the glass to convey the disconnect between the four individuals and the identities they have been assigned. The text appears to float above each image, and in this way it establishes a separation between the women and these titles or roles. </p> <p>Weems’s vague depiction of the surroundings of each sitter further denounces these forced identities. The artist used a monochromic red filter, which certainly represents more than an attention-grabbing device: it obscures elements of the original images, most notably the backdrops. As a result, the role each woman plays within her individual scene is unintelligible and remains ambiguous to the viewer. By diverting our attention away from the surroundings, or space, in which each woman finds herself, Weems denies us any indication—or confirmation—of the truthfulness of the text. The question then becomes not whether these women actually worked in the “house,” “field,” “yard,” or “kitchen” but rather whether we, the observers, accept the relegation of an individual to a single identity. </p> <p><strong>Sophia Taylor<br>Princeton Class of 2020</strong><br>(prepared for the course AAS 349 / ART 364, Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery Across the Black Atlantic, Spring 2017)</p>

<p><strong>Student label, AAS 349 / ART 364, Seeing to Remember: Representing Slavery Across the Black Atlantic, Spring 2017:</strong> </p> <p>In Carrie Mae Weems’s series<em> From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried</em>, the artist explored the ways in which black individuals have, throughout history, been denied a role in shaping their identities. This set of four photographs, <em>House/Field/Yard/Kitchen</em>, exposes the inaccuracy and insufficiency of the identities imposed on black Americans by boldly branding the images of four women, about whom virtually nothing is known other than their enslavement, with various roles from the plantation. <br>The identities and histories of most of the subjects in Weems’s series are unknown, and the artist emphasized this ambiguity. Over each photo, Weems placed a monochromic red filter. This filter obscured much of the background in each image, with the bottom right photograph (<em>Kitchen</em>) being completely erased in red. Additionally, all four images have been enlarged and cropped to show only the top half of the figures, focusing our attention on the facial expression of each woman while hiding much of the surrounding environment from view. </p> <p>The identity of each woman may be unknown, but this does not stop Weems, or any one of us, from assigning her one. Each photograph is labeled, visibly marked by the sandblasted text across each frame. In combination with the concealed effect of the red filters and cropped images, these seemingly “floating” plantation roles feel all the more imposed. The portraits are enclosed by black borders, and their final appearance bears a striking resemblance to the lens of a camera, or, given the effect of the enlarged images, the lens of a microscope. The microscopic “lens” that Weems positioned over each woman further enforces her message about the invasive and commonly oversimplified nature of the identities assigned to black individuals.</p> <p><strong>Sophia Taylor<br>Princeton Class of 2020</strong></p>

In her series <em>From Here I Saw What Happened . . . And I Cried</em>, Weems considers the impact of historical photographs of Black Americans on contemporary perceptions. In <em>House/Field/Yard/Kitchen</em>, Weems saturates reproductions of nineteenth-century portraits of enslaved women in a glowing blood red and inscribes text across the glass that covers the photographs. The words that adorn each image define domestic spaces typically occupied by enslaved women within the hierarchy of labor on a plantation. Weems draws attention to the endurance of stereotypes based on these categories in contemporary media depictions of the domestic labor of Black women. In the photographs the artist has chosen, each woman stares directly at the viewer, reasserting her individuality in an act of defiance.