Carrie Mae Weems

This is one of thirty-four images that compose From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, an elegiac work that addresses photography's complicity in the reinforcement of racist ideas. In photographs African Americans have often been reduced to stereotypes and robbed of their individual identities. Weems's work is not only a commentary on the representation of black people in millions of photographs; it also responds to the status and perception of African Americans in the United States throughout history.

The artist rephotographed images from the time of the American Civil War through the period of the civil rights movement. She used a red filter to diminish the pictures' documentary authority and cropped each image to create a kind of telescopic view that emphasizes the viewer's temporal distance from the subjects. From daguerreotypes to documentary photographs, each picture is accompanied by text written by Weems, etched on a protective pane of glass. The series begins with a profile view of a dignified African woman looking to the right, as if toward the future, and it ends with the same image printed in reverse, so that she is seen looking back over the gathered pictures—hence the title of the series. When the work is seen in its entirety, the short texts inscribed on the glass read like a bitter poem.