11/2-Artist-Carla Williams

Carla Williams
Gallery
Website/blog

I found this artist's website a while ago but it is very hard to navigate. The gallery is hidden and the website functions mostly as a blog. Information about her work is very limited as well. Her work is very interesting to me and I feel as if its relevant. In her series "How to Read Character" she couples self portraits with pages from this book on characteristics of black people. The below was next to a page titled "A Virtuous Negro's Head". She uses silver gelatin prints and couples them with photocopy transfers from the text.

A Virtuous Negro's Head,
from How To Read Character


















"This work addresses the historical precedents of the particular kinds of visual representation. Through juxtapositions of nineteenth-century images and texts on racial differentiation and categorization with contemporary self-portraits, I hope to suggest to the viewer that such precedents, while seemingly absurd and outdated, still contain a great deal of resonance and power with respect to the way that we read and respond to contemporary images of African American women" (Williams).

The work itself was done in the early nineties, around 1991 or so.






















Besides her imagery dealing with racial profiling, I was really interested in her use of family photographs. She did a piece using pictures of her female relatives. Apparently she has all of her family photos and responded to them in a big installation piece.



"All the Women in My Family was conceived as a self-portrait—as the keeper of the family photographs and as someone who has spent most of the last several years deriving my professional identity from archival and historical work rather than imagemaking. I don’t literally appear in any of the photos, but these women are my flesh and blood—some I know well, some I never met. Some of the photographs I took; most are culled from family archives. Which ones are which doesn’t really make a difference for the viewer. There are general thematic connections—all school photos, for example–or familial connections, like a mother and daughter, or the same person as a child and as an adult. Family pictures are so much about memory, and memory is fleeting…the transparent medium and the way it curls and layers with other images evokes that quality of memory that isn’t fixed."

I thought the piece was really interesting. Im not sure I agree with the presentation but it does spark some ideas about using family pictures. I have been thinking about including appropriated family images in my work but not sure how I want them to function. I have to first actually get my hands on them in order to even respond to them.

I find it really hard to find photographers that aren't white. Its interesting because I know that in our contemporary world that there is more diversity but my search narrows.