 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Carla Williams, and I'm here as both a photographer and a photo historian. And in many ways, I think I'm kind of like the genealogical researchers who have been spoken about earlier today, who go out and seek information about their ancestry and do so through the DNA tests that are available now or through some other means of self-identification. So what I'd like to talk about today is some of my photographic work in which I'm using both pictures I made and family photographs to do that a similar kind of searching for identity. This is a photograph of my grandmother that I made. I think when I was a graduate student, and I included because when I took up photography, I started making a lot of self-portraits. I really, for a lot of different reasons, one of which was sort of the easiest thing, and I really liked portraits. But my family didn't have any real connection to those images. They're not particularly interested in art. But they are interested in themselves and our family narrative. And so when I began to make photographic images of my family and include them in the space of my work, I was much more able to draw them in both symbolically as well as literally into the frame. I was able to bring them into the picture. And that made a huge difference for me as an artist. I'm showing you images from three different bodies of work. Over time, the way in which I began to approach looking for identity, particularly looking for my own self-identity through my family, took on many different forms. A couple of the images here are from a series that I did in which I took family members' clothing and put it on and re-photographed myself wearing it. So this is actually the grandmother before. This is her wedding dress and the stockings that she wore on her wedding in 1926. Very difficult to pull on. They're quite dry-rodded. So you don't want to see the backside of this picture. But I was trying to explore different ways of getting at this question of who am I and who is my identity. And how do I capture that through photography? Because, of course, photography as a science, when it was invented, was believed to be the truth. Many people still believe photography to be the truth, even in the era of Photoshop. And that's an important part of photography's central role in my work is that it bears this relationship to truth that we can't let go of, even in the face of new research or evidence to the contrary, we don't let go of it. And so it's one of the reasons why we continue to use imaging for evidence, for example, or for likenesses, for ID photos, even though we know photographs can be so easily manipulated. And so one of the reasons why I started to photograph my family is because I really wanted to become the keeper of the family photographs. And initially, my mother and grandmother wouldn't give them to me. I think I went through my whole undergraduate career begging for them, and they wouldn't give them to me. But once I started to integrate them into the picture, they handed them over, which was a huge turning point for me, because as the keeper of the family's pictures, I had everything, right? I had access to everything. What I believe to be every narrative, every story, every history that I could possibly contain. And of course, that's not true. Photographs are so subjective. It's subjective when we take them. It's subjective if we're able to take them, if we could afford to take them. My family didn't have cameras. In fact, as my mother pointed out to me, this is a picture of her as a child, overlaid over a photograph of my sister. And so the photographs that they did have were precious to them in very different ways than they were precious to me. I mean, they were precious to them because there were so few, which is also why I got them, right? They were so important to keep them and to keep them safe. And so at one point I started a series in which I really wanted to bring my mother into the picture more than anything. And I really wanted, it almost sort of felt like literally bringing her body into the picture for me because it was important for me for her to feel a part of my process, because of course, she doesn't like to see herself represented in photographs. So this is from a project, it's actually a short video that I made called Mother and Daughter, in which I juxtapose statements and photographs that I made of my mother and self-portraits that I made of me with ambiguous pronouns so that you can't actually tell whose narrative attaches to whose likeness. Because we resemble each other physically, we more than resemble each other in personality. But there are many ways in which the language here belies identification, right? It doesn't allow you to know exactly who is speaking and to whom I'm referring. And that was important to me because I really wanted to create a project in which we were united through photography, right? And that sounds really corny, but in which we sort of became one figure because I thought of us in many ways, a sort of one single line. I come from a very matrilineal family. Many of the women in my family were seamstresses and so one of the reasons I turned to the project of clothing was because of that connection to their labor. I wanted to represent their labor in some way in the photographs. This is my other grandmother's wedding hat. And this is another photograph from the mother and daughter. Oh, the same photograph that you saw before. And so that detail that you saw at the beginning is from a project that I was commissioned to do to make a self-portrait. And what I decided to do instead of photograph myself again was turn to that family archive. And I created this piece entitled All the Women in My Family. And it's a variable size piece. It's usually exhibited about four by eight feet. And what I did was scanned and reprinted every single photograph of every woman in my family and juxtaposed them with one another. My mother's family, my father's family, blood relatives, relatives by marriage, but all of the women in my family because I wanted to both literally and figuratively draw those connections for us. And of course, like anyone's family history, there are tons of holes, right? There's lots of stuff missing. We don't photograph the worst days of our lives, for example. We don't photograph the things we'd rather forget. We always try to represent ourselves at our best. And so it was important for me to be able to represent this range of pictures, both the pictures that I had gotten from my family, these four women, none of whom I knew with these kinds of images from the family. And these are just the way that I laid out the pictures in order to print them out, see if school photographs, track photographs, all of that coming together in order to create a particular kind of family identity. But like any science, photography as a science lies to us in many ways. We like to think that it's true, but it represents something that we bring to the picture, that the picture itself, I believe, can't contain. There's no essence in a piece of paper with chemicals on it. It's just a representation of something that we believe or don't believe. This is from that same other people's clothing project. This was a costume that my cousin had adopted at the time because she was taking belly dancing classes, and it was very significant to her in that moment. I also didn't really fit this costume. And then finally, this is a terrible image of all the women in my family in installation at the California African American Museum. And I include this out-of-focus picture for two reasons. One, because they never let you take pictures in the gallery even if you're the artist and you're trying to suck up to the guard, they don't let you take the picture. So I snuck this picture. And it was the first and only time you were in the gallery. I brought my sister and my mother. They live right down the street. And we walked into the gallery, and my mother walked over to it. She touched it, and of course the guard scurried over. And she got on the phone and she called my cousin and she said, Pam, we're in the museum, we're all here. And so that ability for the photograph and for the way in which we understand photographs, I think, to represent ourselves, to actually represent something that could be fiction, could have some truth to it, but it's mostly a mixture of the two, essential to all of those bodies of work. Thank you.