Beyond Pain: Shifts in the Gaze in Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series
Photography; Representation; Carrie Mae Weems; Everyday Life; Black Narrative.
This research investigates how photography operates within the field of dispute over narrative and representation through the Kitchen Table series (1990) by American artist Carrie Mae Weems, and how this work makes it possible to reflect on the complexity of Black experience through everyday life, beyond a narrative centered on pain. Through bibliographic research and photographic analysis, the study draws on the ideas of authors such as bell hooks (2019), Sueli Carneiro (2023), Hal Foster (2021), Susan Sontag (2004), John Berger (2022) e Patricia Hill Collins (2019) to discuss the main axes that underpin the work: the gaze as a device of power, controlling images, and everyday photography. The Kitchen Table series is used as a case study, analyzing how, through its complex visuality, the work makes it possible, through the gaze and the poetics of everyday life, to break with stigmas and develop a new way of seeing the Black subject. Based on the analyses conducted, Weems's work offers poetics that expands the possibilities of representing the Black subject beyond pain.