JOURNEYS TO THE PAST. EXPLODING THE VISUAL ARCHIVE OF SLAVERY IN CARRIE MAE WEEMS’S FROM HERE I SAW WHAT HAPPENED AND I CRIED

This article examines Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-1996), an installation she created when she was asked by the Getty Museum to respond to their exhibition Hidden Witness: African Americans in Early Photography. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried is a series of appropriated photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth century that she enlarged, cropped, colored and inscribed with short texts that weave them into a narrative. Among the repurposed images are the infamous daguerreotypes of enslaved Black Americans taken by J. T. Zealy for Swiss-American scientist Louis Agassiz in 1850 to support his theory of polygenesis. By the early 1990s they had become emblematic of the violence of representation and though Weems had signed an agreement with Harvard University, the institution that claimed to own them, that she would not use them in her work, she decided she had the moral right to reclaim them. As a conceptual artist engaged in debunking the assumptions of authenticity, objectivity and truthfulness on which documentary photography relied, Weems aimed less to redress the humanity of the violated Black sitters, then to reveal through her work on their images the epistemic system produced by slavery and colonialism. Read in sequence, the words engraved on the glass placed over the prints create a compelling, poetic monologue that dialogues and clashes with the images to revisit the history of the stereotyping of Black Americans and highlight the imbrication of visuality and racism. Basing on Linda Hutcheon’s concept of photo-graphy, that is to say postmodern photographic works that are in themselves «both photo and graphic» (124) –the hyphen signaling the equal weight of both media – the article analyzes the series as a photo-text that aims to trouble the racial visual archive produced by slavery in the US, querying its authority and its reliance on the referentiality and indexicality of photography.