Voice of the Voiceless: The Project of Black Identity in Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Of the pieces shown in the 2016 exhibit “30 Americans” at the Tacoma Art Museum, Carrie Mae Weems's "From here I saw what happened and I cried" (1995-1996) was one of the most impactful. Weems's piece is composed of 33 toned images - with two blue-toned images bookending the other red-toned images - framed in circular mattes with sandblasted text over the glass frame. For this work, Weems re-presents daguerreotypes commissioned by Louis Agassiz in 1850; Each portrait, toned in blood-red, has a sandblasted text overlay that, when put together, presents an American narrative of black identity (the full text is included in the works cited). In this essay, I use Frantz Fanon’s “The fact of blackness” to analyze Weems’s piece within the context of queer theory. Fanon’s theories show the significance of Weems’s appropriation of the daguerreotypes – as she attempts to show that the subjects (as well as the black community in America) have been endlessly categorized and victimized and humiliated at the hands of (and for the benefit of) white people. Weems’s piece reclaims these identities and narratives imposed on her subjects while at the same time forcing viewers to confront the bloody reality of the black American experience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".