This paper offers visual analysis of Carie Mae Weems’s now iconic “Kitchen Table” (1990) exhibit and situates the exhibit within a history of 20th-century black photographers who contested visual regimes of white supremacy by training their lens on everyday spaces, habits, and objects. In Weems’s original series of twenty gelatin prints, the kitchen table is a constant but not uncontested focal point. It bears witness to joy and grief, desire and revulsion, laughter and bitterness and ecstasy and agony. For Weems, the table in her home in Syracuse, New York, is a material object and a narrative conceit and a photographic creation. Through all of these registers, she curates the frame with bodies and objects and plays of light to tell a story even as she provokes a disconnect between what beholders see and what she wants them to know. The table, one could argue, is there but is not created until the camera shutter clicks.
Adopting Weems’s “Kitchen Table” as an organizing conceit in the study of religion, particularly in studies of diasporic and minoritized peoples, offers rich opportunities for exploring materialities, epistemologies, geographies, and theologies of being human. In my remarks, I want to argue that it is important to this work to include a deep consideration of Weems’s camerawork in the conversation. Over the course of the twentieth century, photography became a primary mode of knowledge production in the United States. From journalism to entertainment to art to statecraft, photographs created—not simply documented—human experience, often enough through visual grammars of race and religion. Through the alchemy of photography, quotidian spaces of human intimacy were created as powerful sites of social and political action. Weems has herself named “the role photography has played in supporting and shaping racism.” Her work in “Kitchen Table” extends an opportunity both to elaborate upon the concept she so brilliantly provokes in her series and to situate that work in a longer history in order to better understand the role of photography in shaping discourses of race and religion in the twentieth century and beyond.
Religion is a tacit grammar in Weem’s “Kitchen Table” exhibit, but it emerges more directly in her other works and in the visual traditions she draws upon. In my remarks, I will briefly introduce Roy DeCarava’s 1955 collaboration with Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, as an earlier instance of a Black photographer focusing on quotidian spaces to create a visual counternarrative to sensationalized portraits of black life. DeCarava was the first African American photographer—and the ninth photographer overall—to be granted a Guggenheim fellowship, an honor that enabled him to take time away from his work as a commercial illustrator to take pictures of daily life in Harlem in the early 1950s. DeCarava trained his lens on a range of spaces and people. Weems narrows her focus on the multitudes within a single site. Yet both artists provoke consideration of religion and race as grammars of modern life and invite their beholders to take another look at quotidian spaces as powerful places.
This paper offers visual analysis of Carie Mae Weems’s now iconic “Kitchen Table” (1990) exhibit and situates the exhibit within a history of 20th-century black photographers who contested visual regimes of white supremacy by training their lens on everyday spaces, habits, and objects. In Weems’s original series of twenty gelatin prints, the kitchen table is a constant but not uncontested focal point. It bears witness to joy and grief, desire and revulsion, laughter and bitterness and ecstasy and agony. For Weems, the table in her home in Syracuse, New York, is a material object and a narrative conceit and a photographic creation. Through all of these registers, she curates the frame with bodies and objects and plays of light to tell a story even as she provokes a disconnect between what beholders see and what she wants them to know.