ABSTRACT
American photographer Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) has built a career on the premise of art as activism. She makes explicit her claim to the role of the artist who addresses and recuperates the wound of racial injustice. In considering the ethics of representing sadism, as I have above defined the term, Weems’s spectacular series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, presents several key points of crisis of interpretation, and it is the goal of this chapter to work through the crises presented by Weems’s powerful work. The Peabody Museum daguerreotypes, the re-photographs of which constitute part of Weems’s installation, were taken some 150 years before Weems’s installation was created, and the enslaved Americans whose images the Peabody Museum kept in its files are no longer alive to be re-victimized in a straightforward sense.
