Carrie Mae Weems

"Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find themselves increasingly separated from that world. The closer their life comes to being their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life." - Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle




I created this digital selfie as a response to Carrie Mae Weems' set Roaming. Weems' work in this set was designed to show how the world is seen through the lens of another or how it is to have someone in front of you. stopping you but not confronting you. This is a nod to her other feminist styled work where she makes herself the subject and the object as a response to "the male gaze." With this selfie, I tried to capture the idea of the obstacle without the confrontation, just an immovable figure in front of someone. Like in her work, the lack of eye contact makes it more moving as there is no way tell what exactly the subject is thinking. The quote is important to me because it is very moving; the closer one becomes to their work, the further they move from life. This is evidenced clearly by Weems in her works as she sets to make herself apart from the political side of the argument and more on the moral side of it; the argument being feminism for her.