The ‘Genius’ of Carrie Mae Weems

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Among the recipients of the 2013 MacArthur fellowships is Carrie Mae Weems, whose varied interests and skills encompass photography, film and activism. Though known for work that tackles questions of race and gender, she says it addresses “unrequited love” and the human condition. Her conversation with James Estrin has been edited.

Q.

Congratulations, on the MacArthur. It’s pretty wonderful.

A.

It is beyond wonderful. I feel like I am dancing in the stratosphere. I am sitting here with my tiara on and all of my fake jewels, and a bottle of Champagne that’s half empty. Or should I say half full?

Q.

This is a lovely validation of the work that you’ve been doing for so long. Do you have plans for what the money will enable you to do?

A.

Actually there’s a project I’ve been thinking about for the past year. It’s about women who are turning 60, but it’s also about those people who came of age in the 60s. I’ve spent years shooting lots of video and stills, and I want to do a feature-length film about a woman turning 60 who came of age in the 60s and use that as a metaphor to examine what it means to come of age in one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods of the 20th century.

Q.

Will that be a documentary?

A.

It’s not a documentary, it’s more of a fictional autobiography. I have a lot of footage, now I have this emotional freedom to work on it. Maybe to figure out some quiet time to really sink my teeth into this work that I have wanted to do for a long time, but now I can actually do it without having to think about paying the rent.

Q.

That’s pretty amazing.

A.

It is. It’s extraordinary. I am honored, I am floored, I am beyond gaga and I am even a little cocky and giddy.

Q.

You have this large body of work from over two decades dealing with race and gender and identity. Is that a fair way to characterize it?

A.

That’s the way most people do so, I think that’s fair.

Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman, New York From “The Kitchen Table Series.” 1990.

Q.

How would you characterize it?

A.

I always think about the work ultimately as dealing with questions of love and greater issues of humanity. The way it comes across is in echoes of identity and echoes of race and echoes of gender and echoes of class.

At the end of the day, it has a great deal to do with the breadth of the humanity of African-Americans who are usually stereotyped and narrowly defined and often viewed as a social problem. I’m thinking that it’s not about social problems, that it’s about social constructions. The work has to do with an attempt to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and to that extent it has to do with what I always call unrequited love.

Q.

Which is sort of the human condition.

A.

Exactly, exactly exactly, exactly. It becomes race as a shortcut and gender as a shortcut to the larger questions of humanity on any given subject.

Q.

You started out working in modes that are often documentary but also conceptual. Your projects are very much about ideas and thoughts

A.

Yes, well I started as a documentary photographer. Then, at a certain point, I realized that that really wasn’t what I wanted to do. That it wasn’t quite my way of working. But referencing documentary was important. So for instance, the kitchen table â€" which has all the markings of documentary photography â€" isn’t at all. It’s highly constructed. So I learned fairly early on that photographs are constructed. These can be constructed, and these realities can be as poignant and meaningful as something that was “documentary in nature,” so that you were able to arrive at and deal with multilevels of complexity, tiers of complexity, around the construction of photographs.

Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman, New York Eartha Kitt. From the series “Slow Fade to Black.” 2010.

That idea really challenges me, and excites me and engages me, that it doesn’t have to be the “real moment as seen spontaneously in life,” but that it can be constructed in my living room, my dining room, in my kitchen, in my backyard, and it can be equally honorable, if not more so, than the actual “document” of that reality.

Q.

What are you dealing with in “The Kitchen Table Series”?

A.

The kitchen table stories is really a play around notions of family. It’s really about how one comes into their own.

What are the issues that surround monogamy and polygamy? What are the issues that surround motherhood and friendship â€" compassion? Those are the qualities that are dealt with, and of course it’s really a mock documentary; it’s a mock biography of one woman’s journey as she contemplates and negotiates what it means to be a contemporary woman who wants something different for herself. And it’s been very interesting, because even though it’s anchored around a black woman, my hope was always that it would be understood as a condition of women. And it exceeded my expectations, because women around the world relate to that piece, as do men. They see themselves in it.

Q.

. Can you tell me about your move to film and how that happened?

A.

At a certain point, I realized that I didn’t know how to make photographs sing in a certain way, and I was becoming increasingly interested in composers and music and how one uses the voice. Film and video really allowed me to work across all of those interests in a single project. I could use voice and rhythm and work with the composers and use music to effect a certain visual image.

I love working with film, and even though â€" you know, every time I finish a project, I swear that I’m not going to make another film. It’s so difficult. There are so many aspects, so many parts and so many people that need to be involved. Invariably, as soon as I’ve finished one project, I start thinking about the next, because I love the form.

Q.

Have you given up photography?

A.

Not at all. I still make photographs all the time, and I will continue to do so.

Q.

You’re involved in Syracuse, in a program with young people in the community?

A.

Yes. Several years ago, there was a child killed in Syracuse â€" caught in the cross-fire of gangland violence. And I remember the day so clearly, because it was a snowy day in Syracuse, and I was exhausted. I thought I would just spend the morning in bed reading the newspaper and drinking coffee and looking at books and just relaxing. And I go into the kitchen, I saw this headline about this child that had been killed, and I was so upset about it that I immediately went to the studio and started working. And I started this series â€" a billboard project, actually, a public-art project, using billboards and broadsides and leaflets and a whole host of materials that I could use to do what I call “activating” the community around the issue of violence. And I did that for months and months and months, and it was the only thing I worked on, desperately, and getting things out there in the public.

Then I realized that I also needed to have another kind of response, and not just a response of being reactionary, or reactive, to a condition, but deciding to lead another kind of campaign.

I wanted to do a project that really focuses on young people that gets them engaged and involved in the arts. And so what do young people care about? They care about fashion. They care about music. They care about popular culture, and they care about sex. So I came up with this idea of doing an institute, the Institute of Sound and Style, that introduces kids to different aspects of popular culture â€" as technicians, as videographers, as photographers, as recording engineers.

You don’t have to be a rap singer, that you could be an engineer, that you didn’t have to be in the photograph, that you could make the photograph.

It’s a summer program, we run for four weeks over the course of the summer. We pay kids, because all the kids are desperately poor and need to be paid. We give them at least the minimum wage, and we train them in various aspects of the arts, giving them the skills that they need â€" and introducing them to the skills and ideas that they need to fashion another life for themselves. And it’s truly one of the most exciting things that I’m involved in.

It’s really a fabulous project, and I tell you, I get as much out of it as the kids. So that’s what I’m working on, that’s my heart’s desire. And we take donations.

Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman, New York From “The Kitchen Table Series.” 1990.

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Japanese-Brazilians: Straddling Two Cultures

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Paulo Siqueira grew up in São Paolo, Brazil, going to school in the 1980s with friends whose grandparents had immigrated from Japan earlier in the 20th century to work on coffee plantations. Inside their homes, Japanese language, culture and cuisine prevailed. His friends, he thought, were an interesting mix.

A generation later, some of those young people sought their fortunes in the land of their ancestors, lured back with visas to work in Japan’s auto industry, in factories that made every imaginable auto component. As Mr. Siqueira and his wife, Nadia Shira Cohen, have learned in their recently completed photo essay, “Japanese Brazilians,” navigating the crosscurrents of hopes and cultures is never simple for the Nikkeijin. It is a story familiar to anyone who left home and family for a few years of work that turned into decades.

“In Brazil, they were considered Japanese, but in Japan, they are seen as more Brazilian,” Mr. Siqueira said. “They’ve gone from spending three years in Japan to as much as 15 before they go back to Brazil. They have kids, they have a comfortable life and the migration becomes more stable, but lived in an improvised way.”

The roots of this migration date to the turn of the 20th century, when Brazil sought field hands to do work that had been done by slaves until abolition in 1888. Ms. Cohen said the Brazilian government had pushed this migration before World War I, which set the stage for another wave after World War II.

The Japanese community in Brazil, the couple noted, had the infrastructure to absorb new arrivals: neighborhoods where Japanese newspapers, schools and stores were common. “It was a very closed community, and a lot of the older Japanese maintained their culture,” Mr. Siqueira said. “It was easy for the next migrants to choose Brazil as a destination because everything was set.”

In the late 1980s, two factors combined to spur reverse migration. Brazil abolished its military dictatorship, and Japan was looking for foreign workers for its booming automotive industry. Ms. Cohen said the Japanese government wanted foreign laborers, because they expected their native-born children to become businessmen.

Paulo Siqueira/ParalelloZero and Nadia Shira Cohen Hayumi Honda blew out a candle at her 15th birthday party. Hayumi, who is Brazilian-Japanese, was born and raised in Japan. She speaks Portuguese at home, but speaks and writes Japanese fluently.

“A small group of government officials went to Brazil and saw the Japanese there who retained the culture and spoke Japanese,” Ms. Cohen said. “The problem is they focused mainly on the older generation, not that any of them were going to use the opportunity of a visa to get a job. The ones who went to Japan were the Brazilianized kids.”

The community now numbers some 200,000 migrants, she said. Those first migrants were able to work for a few years and return to Brazil to open small businesses and buy a house. But as years went on â€" and the global economy soured â€" people have stayed longer and faced more difficult challenges. Now they compete with other workers from Asia for a smaller number of jobs. Work contracts â€" which sometimes provide other practical services to help with life and chores outside of work â€" are shorter and bring fewer benefits.

Those changes accentuated some of the cultural clashes that were inevitable. While some of those whose children were born in Japan learned the language â€" which is critical to integrating into the culture â€" others have fared less well. Ms. Cohen recalls one woman who left her newborn child with a relative in Brazil as she went to look for work in Japan. Fourteen years later, no closer to returning, she sent for the boy.

“She doesn’t have the money to send him to a Brazilian school, which is expensive,” Ms. Cohen said. “So he goes to a Japanese school. I asked him how it was and he said he didn’t do anything, just sit around. He is not integrating and learning because the language barrier is huge. And he’s already at an age where it’s so easy to get lost.”

The Japanese government, she said, since 2009 has been offering migrants $3,000 per head of household and $2,000 for family members â€" and a one-way ticket to Brazil. Yet some persist in staying. The reasons became clear as the couple worked on their project this year, which coincided with street protests in Brazil over corruption, unemployment and poverty.

“The Japan story gave us a different angle to look at those troubles,” Ms. Cohen said. “They are staying in Japan to raise their families, not because they love Japan, but because it is a place that has public services, health care, schools and a working pension system. It’s a safe environment for them to play and walk around.”

The couple â€" as well as their 13-month-old son, Rafael, who accompanies them on their projects â€" now plan to explore the Brazilian side of the story when they return to Brazil in the winter from their base in Italy. It will be interesting to see how those who spent a chunk of their lives on the other side of the world manage their way in a place they may not have seen in decades.

“I can’t think of two cultures that are more different than Brazil and Japan,” Mr. Siqueira said. “When you say hi to someone in Brazil, you kiss or have physical contact. Japanese are really reserved, and everything works in society because nobody gets out of line. In Brazil, there is no line.”

Paulo Siqueira/ParalelloZero and Nadia Shira Cohen A boy caught butterflies in a public housing complex’s park, in Chiryu.

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