Commenting on her poetic engagement with Framed by Modernism (1996), the photographic collaboration between Carrie Mae Weems and Robert Colescott, the poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin remarks on how her response to the series ‘illuminates modernism’s yoke of representation when it comes to the black body’.1 The three photographs which Lundy encountered at the Montclair Art Museum are presented as portraits of Colescott, but the images also include Weems in the background, nude and standing in a corner of the room. The bodies of two Black artists are subject to the technological and aesthetic frame of the photographic medium, a racialising form that is accentuated by Weems’s signature black and white palette. But Weems is both behind the camera and in front of it, in a portrait that she did not have to be a part of, as though she is deliberately toying with the camera’s demands for Black legibility by willingly acquiescing to them. Martin sees in the image ‘a trajectory between historic representations of blackness, the representation of the female body by male artists and a unique tension between subject and object in which the lack of agency is not a devout positioning’.