Carrie Mae Weems: I love the city. I love the energy of New York and w...

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

Carrie Mae Weems

solace art-is art

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.

Carrie Mae Weems

invisibility black clouds

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.

Carrie Mae Weems

powerful beautiful art

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.

Carrie Mae Weems

cameras people looks

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.

Carrie Mae Weems

powerful photography believe

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

Carrie Mae Weems

done feelings people

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)

Carrie Mae Weems

cameras moving firsts

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?

Carrie Mae Weems

important artist thinking

Sometimes my work needs to be photographic, sometimes it needs words, sometimes it needs to have a relationship to music, sometimes it needs to have all three and become a video projection.

Carrie Mae Weems

video three needs

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

Carrie Mae Weems

take-me photography taken

I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

Carrie Mae Weems

my-boyfriend birthday art

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.

Carrie Mae Weems

risk important use

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

Carrie Mae Weems

simple trying people

I really like the structure of my body. It moves well, it looks good, it photographs well, it understands gesture and nuance.

Carrie Mae Weems

body looks moving

I've been busy for a long, long time. I've received a ton of awards in the past few years ... I think they're really great, it's really an honor, but s**t - I really have to work for these things.

Carrie Mae Weems

awards past thinking

I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up - you can't avoid that if you're a person of color in this country.

Carrie Mae Weems

you slavery family racism

It's impossible to change the social without changing the personal - you have to put your money where your mouth is. And if you're not making those challenges at home, it's unlikely you'll make them in a larger setting.

Carrie Mae Weems

you money change home

I emerged in that incredible moment in the 1980s when all kinds of social questions about subjectivity and objectivity, about who was making, who was looking.

Carrie Mae Weems

looking questions who moment

My father was very interested in music, and when he and his brothers were young, they had a singing group that used to open for Sam Cooke. There was always music in our house, but there wasn't much art around.

Carrie Mae Weems

singing music father art

I think that still, for the most part, even in 2010, the vast majority of museum shows and gallery shows and gallerists are pretty much dominated by men. So having a sense of what women are up to, for me, frankly, is very, very important.

Carrie Mae Weems

think me women men

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.