Carrie Mae Weems’s Visual Response to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”

The below photo essay, a visual response to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” is excerpted from Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces, edited by Scott Burnham, Marna Seltzer, and Dorothea von Moltke, and published by Princeton University Press. The editors write in the introduction that Weems’s essay “exhorts us to ‘hear’ in her images the lament that is also both a promise and a plea contained in the soul lyric by Sam Cooke: ‘It’s been so long, it’s been so long, a little too long / Achange has gotta come.'”

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(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

(© Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

Excerpt copyright © 2021 by Princeton University Concerts, reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press.