Magenta Colored Girl, Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953)

“Magenta Colored Girl” is part of the series “Colored People” that Carrie Mae Weems began in the mid 1980s in reaction to political and cultural movements. Many of those photographed in this series are people Weems knows, including family members. Weems said, “When I was a kid I was called ‘Red Bone.’ That’s what a lot of my family called me. And so that idea about being a red girl as opposed to a caramel-colored girl, or a chocolate-colored girl I thought was really sort of fabulous, in a way of really being very specific about what somebody looked like, what their color reflected, you know?”