Photograph by Ed Pollard, Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II digital slr-2008.

Untitled

Artist Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)

Date2003

MediumPigmented inkjet print

DimensionsOverall, Image: 10 × 10 in. (25.4 × 25.4 cm)
Overall: 12 × 14 in. (30.5 × 35.6 cm)
Overall, Mat: 22 × 18 1/8 in. (55.9 × 46 cm)

ClassificationsPhotography

Credit LineGift of Joyce F. and Robert B. Menschel

Object number2007.12.113.3

Terms

Poem
Woman
Hat
Dress
Trees
Path
Vegetation
African-American Artist
Black and White
Florida

On View

Not on view

DescriptionThis gelatin silver print is of a woman walking down a sandy path covered by trees and surrounded by vegetation. On the photograph are the words: "Square toed and flat-footed you appear as my guardian angel leading me along the dust tracks in the road & back to the meaning of myself";

Label Texttop Carrie Mae Weems American, b. 1953 Untitled, 2003 Pigmented inkjet print (photograph), from the Eatonville series Gift of Joyce F. and Robert B. Menschel 2007.12.113.3 bottom Thomas Barrow American, b. 1938 Barcelona Backdrop, 1975 Gelatin silver print (photograph), from the Cancellations series Gift of James and Holly Bogin 2005.27.10 These two photographs dramatize the relationship between artists and the natural world. Above, Carrie Mae Weems pairs text and image to evoke the life and spirit of writer Zora Neal Hurston (1891–1960). The photograph comes from a series on Eatonville, Florida, Hurston’s home and the first U.S. town incorporated by black residents. In the image, Weems reenacts the writer’s daily life, suggesting how a place like Eatonville exists in memory and imagination as much as in the land itself. Below, Thomas Barrow’s deadpan image of a desolate parking lot captures the human manipulation of the natural world. Yet by carving a large X into his negative (which ensures it will appear in every print), he asserts the artist’s role in making the image, demonstrating that any depiction of the landscape is a manipulated scene.