Carrie Mae Weems Quotes

I don’t like directing a lot of people. So trying to keep things really simple and elegant is my preferred way of working.

How you get work done is by exploiting yourself and your feelings, and sometimes people get in the way.

It’s fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility – this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs]… This invisibility – this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time – is the greatest source of my longing.

Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday)

Photography can still be used to champion activism and change. I believe this, even while standing in the cool winds of postmodernism… Postmodernism looked radical, but it wasn’t. As a movement it was profoundly liberal and became a victim of itself. Precisely at this historical moment, when multicultural democracy is the order of the day, photography can be used as a powerful weapon toward instituting political and cultural change. I for one will continue to work toward this end.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

It’s very important for me to really use this body as a barometer of a certain kind of knowledge–to take the personal risk of exposing my own body in a certain kind of way. I can’t ask anybody else to do something that I don’t do first myself.

Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.

You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We’re all deeply influenced by what’s around us; we don’t make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we’re influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we’ve been influenced by something that’s come before?

I love the city. I love the energy of New York and what happens here. But I’m very happy I don’t live in the city on a daily basis, because I really do spend a great deal of my time, when I’m not on the road, in my studio – everyday, everyday, everyday.

Art is the one place we all turn to for solace.

I didnt know photography would take me to the places that it has taken me