Nadia's Selfie and Quotes

Untitled (Woman with Daughter)

Learning

On Photography, Susan Sontag

• “Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.”
• “The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.”

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

• “Weems’s black-and-white photographs are like mirrors, each reflecting a collective experience: how selfhood shifts through passage of time; the sudden distance between people, both passable and impassable; the roles that women accumulate and oscillate between; how life emanates from the small space we occupy in the world.”
• “But it was also a seminal moment for Black representation in art, influencing an entire generation of artists who rarely saw their own selves reflected back on museum walls.”

“The Cindy Sherman Effect”

• “No wonder the work of so many artists parallels Sherman’s, or at least mines similar conceptual veins: role-playing and the nature of identity; sexual and cultural stereotypes; the pressure to conform to the images of perfection promulgated through television, film, and advertising.” 
• “Cindy changed all women’s lives—she put names to the stereotypes associated with women by making pictures of them. When you can name something, you can laugh at it.”