25 Quotes by Carrie Mae Weems

It's impossible to change the social without changing the personal - you have to put your money where your mouth is. And if you're not making those challenges at home, it's unlikely you'll make them in a larger setting.

In terms of digital photography, I continue to print and use film for the most part. I still shoot with film, 21/4 film specifically, and I love it. I love it because I know what it does, how it really responds to light.

The ideas I'm working with are ideas I'm committed to. I don't know how to soft-shoe them. I don't know how to make them more palpable. I just never knew how to be one of those girls. I wish I knew how to be that sometimes, but I don't know how to be that way.

I don’t like directing a lot of people. So trying to keep things really simple and elegant is my preferred way of working.

It’s very important for me to really use this body as a barometer of a certain kind of knowledge – to take the personal risk of exposing my own body in a certain kind of way. I can’t ask anybody else to do something that I don’t do first myself.

I got my first camera when I was 21 – my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday – but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

I didnt know photography would take me to the places that it has taken me.