Friday, October 4, 2024 at 13.30 EDT • 12.30 CDT • 18.30 BST
This lecture is drawn from Smith’s book Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (Duke 2020). It focuses on Carrie Mae Weems’s photograph series Constructing History, for which Weems and a group of students reenacted famous photographs from the U.S. Civil Rights era. It discusses the elegiac and ambivalent nature of Weems’s recreations, which are often focused on assassinations, and proposes that the photographs enact a form of melancholia that creates an affective openness to the past and calls attention to a political project that remains unfinished. Constructing History highlights the complex relationship between photography and memory. Through photographic reenactment the work emphasizes the embodied nature of historical memory and amplifies the disruptive temporality of both photography and performance.
Shawn Michelle Smith is professor and chair of Visual and Critical Studies at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago. She studies the history and theory of photography and
race and gender in visual culture. She is an award-winning author of
seven books, including most recently Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time
of Photography (Duke 2020). She has received fellowships from the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and the Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture, among others.
Recommended Reading:
Image credit: Carrie Mae Weems, A Woman Observes, from the series Constructing History, 2008, archival pigment print, 61 × 51 1/8 in. (154.9 × 129.9 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2022.48.1, © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.