Tender
Carla Williams
Tender is the first monograph by artist Carla Williams. Tender reveals a serie private self-portraits of an eighteen-year-old Williams taken during her time studiying photography at Princeton University in the mid 1980s and 1990s. And kept mostly to herself for more than thirty years. The book offers an intimate glimpse into a pivotal moment of the artist’s life.
Carla Williams (born 1965 in Los Angeles) is an American photographer. She came into this world on the front seat of a Buick station wagon. When she went to college she became interested in photography. Studiying photography at Princeton, when she was eighteen, she began making black and white and colour portraits. Her mind was filled equally with the canonical images of the medium’s male-driven history and the posing women discovered in her father’s pornograhpy collection.
At some point Carla Williams discovered her father’s pornography stash in the bathroom. Because he got them from the secondhand store, they were mainly mainstream titles like Playboy of Penthouse. As you might suspect, Playboy and Penthouse at that time, the 1970s and early 1980s, weren’t exactly popping with black pinups. Williams was in awe of all of these women. And in some part they were the reason why she began to make self-portraits when she took up photography in college in 1983. She wanted to be seen and wanted to be in control of what that looked like. She started experimenting and at some stage took off her clothes. Williams never showed the pictures to anyone and put away those negatives for more than thirty years. Until the publication of this book.
The pictures are made in constant dialogue with her photographic predecessors via interpretation, revision and reenactment. And though we may be aware that a performance is taking place we also see that a kind of introspection is carried out as well. The history of self-portraiture that this work belongs with is long and varied. One can look to Rembrandt in painting and Lee Friedlander in photography. But in that history the self-representation of queer Black women is without meaningful attention or appraisal. Perhaps with the exception of Zanele Muholi. For Williams the formative impressions of her youth would provide the widest and most varied set of examples of how the black female body was most commonly being portrayed. Establishing a set of representational models that she could respond to and make her own.
Tender
Photographer: Carla Williams
Publisher: TBW Books
Published in 2023
Soft cover with dust jacket, 160 pages, 80 plates, 20,3 x 25,4 cm
Signed and numbered by the artist
Includes an original print 10,2 x 15,2 cm
Texts by Carla Williams and Mireille Miller-Young
Winner of the 2023 Paris Photo – Aperture First Photobook Award
Chosen by people immersed in the photobook world as one of their favorite photobooks of 2023