People like Mickalene Thomas, Cindy Sherman, and Lorna Simpson have come along, and all of us sort of stand in a line, marking a trajectory that’s deeply concerned with the constructed image and representation of the female subject. Would you say that those images now exist today? Oh yes, I think there are certainly more women known to us who are making important and seminal work focused on the dynamic and complex lives of women. It started with you trying to create images you thought didn’t exist at that point-ones that properly represented women, and black women in particular. The sense of time is really displaced within the work. It’s very difficult to discern when the work was made it could have been made 30 years ago, or it could have been made 30 days ago. I still find it remarkable, and I’m still completely surprised by it, and how it’s still so completely contemporary. All those things came together in this piece. I really do think of it as a seminal body of work-it was the coming together of many, many, many sorts of stops and starts and trials and errors, just that sort of struggle of a young artist to discover the nuance of my own voice, my own photographic style, my own vocal utterance.

I started working on it in like 1989 and I finished it in 1990, so it’s been around for a long time.

How do you feel about this series now, over 30 years on? It’s interesting. Here, Weems reflects on why it’s as relevant as ever. It’s now finally getting a stand-alone copy, out at the end of April from Damiani. And her Kitchen Table Series has been equally enduring, making its way into plenty of books and museums over the years. Since then, Weems has landed a MacArthur “genius grant” and around 50 solo shows, including the Guggenheim’s first retrospective of an African-American woman. She didn’t realize, though, that it would take on historical significance, too, paving the way for a generation of women artists concerned with their own representation, as well as in conversations of race and relationships to boot. Obsessive in telling the story of the woman she was playing-whom we follow through the course of relationships with her lover, her friends, and her daughter-Weems knew the series would be important to her. Decades ago in Northampton, Massachusetts, Carrie Mae Weems began devoting a part of every single day to photographing herself at her kitchen table.

Carrie mae weems