Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe

by Tina M. Campt

In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt's study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960.

Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography.

Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of "race" in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

Genres: Photography, History, Nonfiction, Theory, School, Race

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2012

About the author

Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. One of the founding researchers in Black European Studies, her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe, focusing on the role of vernacular photography in processes of historical interpretation. Her books include: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University Michigan Press, 2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), and Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017).

Reviews

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tina Campt’s Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe examines the structures of feelings that circulate and travel through photographs in the Black diaspora in Europe. Campt’s strength is her use of theory, specifically how she is able read affect in photography and connect that to issues of embodiment, memory, and visibility. While Campt’s analysis of the photos are sufficient, I found them less convincing for her overall argument saw them at odds with her theoretical analysis. Additionally, Campt does excellent job of balancing out academic jargon on affect theory with personal memory and memories, thereby presenting an intriguing and intellectually rewarding read. Scholars/readers of cultural studies, collective memory, and the Black diaspora will find value and interest in this book.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A worthwhile project. The writing is good; when she tries to explain how pictures are actually music is not.