In a 2021 article in Aperture, Sasha Bonét writes about Carrie Mae Weems’s series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, on view at MoMA. Bonét explores the meaning of the series, by looking at the history of the photographs Weems reappropriates, and how they have been used and understood. “To be Black in America often means that your history has been deliberately withheld, and the fragments that remain have been reframed to veil the unconscionable terrors that built the foundation of this nation,” Bonét writes. Weems uses these fragments to “construct a narrative that reckons with this somber history and draws a straight line to contemporary racialized norms.”
Read the Aperture article here.