Carla Williams is an artist and writer based in San Francisco. Her work as a photographer and historian addresses subjects such as identity, family relationships and memory, race and acts of naming, and ideals of beauty. Self-portraits have played a role in Williams’ body of work since the late 1980s, when she was still a student. Initially, as Williams herself observes, her work provided “an exploration of physicality, beauty, sexuality, power, and pleasure through humor, seduction, and performance” in a way that was not overly deliberate or political. In her self-portraits from the 1990s, however, such as the one included here, Williams began to respond in more knowing and explicit ways to the value granted by society to certain appearances and to the implications, in terms of race and gender, of both historical and contemporary representations of the body.
