Merret's Selfie & Quotes

 

Susan Sontag: On Photography

"To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store."

“The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images.”

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power.

Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Landmark “Kitchen Table Series”

“This woman can stand in for me and for you; she can stand in for the audience, she leads you into history. She’s a witness and a guide,” 

“Carrying a tremendous burden, she is a Black woman leading me through the trauma of history. I think it’s very important that as a Black woman she’s engaged with the world around her; she’s engaged with history, she’s engaged with looking, with being. She’s a guide into circumstances seldom seen.”

“I think [the series is] important in relationship to Black experience, but it’s not about race,” Weems told W magazine in 2016. “I think that most work that’s made by Black artists is considered to be about Blackness. Unlike work that’s made by white artists, which is assumed to be universal at its core.”

The Cindy Sherman Effect

“'I think it has made me realize that we’ve all chosen who we are in terms of how we want the world to see us,' she says."

“With Photoshop anything goes, and I don’t want to make easy crazy characters just because I can. I think there are some artists who are fine without any boundaries. It somehow frees them. But I really need certain limitations to know how far I can go and work within that.”