Carrie Mae Weems: Slow Fade to Black

Slow Fade to Black is a series of 26 photographs of iconic black female singers and performers from the mid-20th century. 

Caught in the act of performing memorable career moments, they are intentionally shown out of focus. In doing so, the resulting photographs focus on the vanishing memory of them. 

"I started to realize that I rarely heard mention of these women" said the author: a disappearance connected to time passing by, a generational fact, but also very much the result of a triple prejudice: towards race, gender and the process of aging.

The erasure of black figures runs throughout American history. In recent years, a shadow in a 1837 painting was re-discovered as the overpainted image of a black teenager and the canvas, forgotten in a storage for many years, has hence been acquired by the MET Museum, where it has been proudly exhibited. A step forward in the process of repossession.

The truth is that erasure can also be a powerful act of affirmation, as Conceptual art has shown us. Almost nothing was left, but that nothing was sublime wrote Italian artist Emilio Isgrò. Weems' 2021 series Painting the Town is a wonderful example of how sublime and loud walls covered by overpainted slogans can be and make their message crystal clear. If anything is blurred in this series, it is the line between painting and photography and there is absolutely no confusion about the message.

In these portraits women are vanishing, disappearing before our eyes. We can still see them, proudly standing, caught in images that might have been the cover of Ebony or Jet Magazine. They are contemporary incarnations of the Black Madonna, their images playing a key role in defining the aesthetic-cultural codes of African American identity.

Now, on the threshold, they demand a due act of recognition, their voices to be heard, their performances to be remembered and their place in history restored.

A few years ago, a major exhibition by Carrie Mae Weems was called ‘The Evidence of Things Not Seen’, which quoted both the title of a James Baldwin book and the Bible. The evidence of things unseen is faith. We might add that love, then, is the force that brings things out of the dark. 

-Giulia Zorzi of Micamera, Milan