On View: A Photographer Visits With Her Younger Self
At Higher Pictures in New York, the artist Carla Williams has restaged the 72 self-portraits she made for her college thesis show in 1986. This is her first gallery exhibition.
Here’s what she said about looking back at her own archive.
While studying at Princeton University, Williams started making self-portraits for practical reasons: “I wanted to learn how to use a large-format camera, and I thought it would be annoying to ask someone to sit while I fumbled through the process,” she says. She soon became attached to “the way self-portraiture collapsed the relationship between the photographer and the subject. It eliminated a third party; it was just me and the camera. I could perform for it.”
“I was diligent with my shooting,” Williams says of these works, which were originally untitled. “The camera was always set up in my dorm room, regardless of my mood.” In “Untitled (Tired)/(Window) #25,” she sees “a kind of [cumulative] exhaustion and weariness.”
Williams decided to restage her thesis show while working on her first monograph, “Tender” (2023). During that process, she got back in touch with her former professor Emmet Gowin, who decades earlier had praised Williams’s show as one of the best projects he’d seen in his teaching career. “Emmet’s words had a lot of impact,” she says.
Williams was inspired by “images that male photographers made of their wives, girlfriends and muses”; Playboy and Penthouse magazine spreads; and Cindy Sherman’s work. “I loved that she was only using herself,” Williams says. “I thought, ‘Well, if she can do it, I can do it.’”
Williams also recalls a religious influence. “Looking at ‘Untitled (Tired)/(Window) #25’ almost 40 years later, it reminds me of a crucifixion. I grew up in a beautiful parish church in Los Angeles, and I was very indoctrinated by the visual culture of Catholicism,” she says. “That open chest with the arms outstretched is a very vulnerable gesture. It’s like you’re laying yourself bare.”
“I see these pictures now and I go, ‘OK, you did not have curtains, you lived on the first floor and you always had your clothes off. What were you thinking?’” Williams says. But back then, she didn’t consider the portraits to be intensely personal or revealing. She saw them as a way of inserting herself into art history as a Black woman, a photographer and a subject.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/07/t-magazine/carla-williams-photographs-exhibit.html