The Poetics of Carrie Mae Weems's Documentary Portraits Past and Present

Abstract

James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) takes the reader through a saga of injustice that finds a young black man in prison near Harlem in the 1970s. This is a love story—the lustful, playful kind—between Fony and Tish, intertwined with Tish's family's trust, which strives to keep the couple strong throughout his incarceration and her pregnancy. This is a devastating portrayal of a family that is armed with irony, grace, and intelligence but that still cannot protect the couple from the hate stacked against them. The young woman's narrative voice conveys the terror and the tenderness. The groans of painful histories, the sighs of joyful family communion, and the acute witnessings of a woman in Baldwin's novel are akin to the voices that resonate throughout Carrie Mae Weems's incisive photographic and multimedia work from the mid-1980s to the end of this current decade. My attraction to the intertwining trajectories of Weems's exquisite work compels me to consider the poetic strategies within her expansive documentary practice. Looking back to consummate projects that address social injustice and cultural violence primarily directed toward African American people allows an investigation into Weems's ingenious reformulations of the traditional means of documentary photography. Her rethinking gives renewed life to the core vitality of the genre: to teach, to warn, and to mourn. Weems's early approaches to documentary photographic strategies began in 1984, working from the early twentieth-century black Harlem photographers' tradition …