Carrie Mae Weems confronts questions of race, class, and gender in her photographic explorations of black identity. Commissioned by The Getty Institute as a response to an exhibition of rare photographs of African-Americans from the 1840s through the 1860s, Weems created the multi-part From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried. The two components installed here represent a portion of the larger 32-image project and feature reproductions of a 1925 image of a Mangbetu chief’s wife alongside a series of historical pictures of slaves in America. The words house, field, yard, and kitchen, that appear over the latter images are reminders that the individual personalities and unique lives of these women were eclipsed by the terms of their enslavement, and their depictions stand in dramatic contrast to the commanding presence of the flanking African royal portrait. Through her provocative and emotionally charged juxtapositions, Weems suggests not only the role photography plays in conveying a tragically biased history butalso its potential to be reinterpreted into a more complex and fully-fledged narrative of the past.