Listening to Images

by Tina M. Campt

In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. She hears in these photos—which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders—a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.

Genres: Art, Photography, Nonfiction, Race, Theory, History, Feminism

152 pages, Paperback

Published April 7, 2017

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

[Joe T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful book by Tina M. Campt. Theorizing sound as a mode of engaging the photography archives of the African Diaspora photography, she atunes our ears (and eyes) to the low frequencies that illuminates the fugitive practices of the everyday that black people use to live the black feminist future now. This is a powerful read that is at once theory and method of engagement that is and will continue to be important to the field of visual culture.

[Ife · Rating 5 out of 5]

what shifts when we think of self-fashioning as not necessarily an inextricable expression of agential intention or autonomy? What if we understand it as a tense response that is not always intentional or liberatory, but often constituted by miniscule or even futile attempts to exploit extremely limited possibilities for self-expression and futurity in/as an effort to shift the grammar of black futurity to a temporality that both embraces and exceeds their present circumstances- a practice of living the future [we] want to see

Listening to Images is such a frustratingly brilliant book. I say this because though the ideas in it have cosmic insight, it is mired by what I initially perceived to be an academic gimmick. Campt argues that at times when looking at certain images that capture Black futurity and fugitivity we have to "listen to images", open ourselves up to the 'lower frequencies' they emit which are best attended to through the haptic metaphor of sound and hearing. In essence (at least from what I gleaned of her analysis, I could be entirely wrong), she simply means open ourselves up to the multiple sensory experiences that come from looking at images, looking behind the veil of the image and taking into account the time and historical context in order to connect with the subject. Is this an idea that is aided by the metaphor? No. In my opinion it confuses the average reader, makes them wonder whether they really understand what she is saying or whether they are too dumb to fully get it.

I have to admit that part of my reflexive reaction to this language was that I tend to read theory very cerebrally, often not engaging my emotions as well. As Campt went through more and more case studies I started to feel her archives, sensorially placing myself there and having a more profound engagement with the images, so I completely understand what she means by the frequencies and to some degree haptics of imagery - that alone for me made the book extremely special. I'm still chewing on the sound metaphor.

Usually, if I have this many complaints about a book, it wouldn't be getting a 5 star but what Campt does here really is deserving of nothing less than that. Campt has essentially come up with a fairly novel framework of analysing images, although blending semiotics and historical analysis, she has been brave enough to try to pen down a way to try to verbalise a more sensory version of Roland Barthes' studium and punctum particularly applying it to cases of colonial and identification imagery. Because it is so subjective at times, the framework can sound woo-woo but I think the historical and sensory elements of the analysis ground it.

The ideas about how colonial passports conveyed their subjects governmentality, the ideas about stasis and fashion as an embodiment of the prefigurative and linking the phrenological and Darwinian elements of old mug shots to ideas of Black captivity and the modern passport photo all blew my mind. I will be thinking about this book and the ideas in it for a long, long time.

Everybody who wants to be better at critiquing images absolutely NEEDS to read this book!!

[Izetta Autumn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book just moments ago, on what is an exquisite spring day, while I sat on my balcony in soft warm sun. When I finished I sat with the book in my hands, still soaking in the beauty, brilliance, and timeliness of this work. Reading Listening to Images, felt deeply humbling. Campt has presented generative, thoughtful, deeply reflective work that in turn caused me to more closely attend to Black futurity, Black fugitivity, and the haptic qualities of photographs.

I finished the book, in perfect early evening sunshine, closed the cover and a feeling came to me that this book will be one that I return to over and over again as I come to understand different angles, as I think and grow. It's a powerful thing to read a book that opens your mind and heart. It feels like a real gift to have read this and to have read it on this day in May.

[M. Ainomugisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A most supremely brilliant look into the quotidian strategies and practices of refusal in the photographic archive.

By creatively proposing a Black feminist and futurist examination of different registers in the photographic archive, Campt exceeds what is controlled, what is naturalized as static, by proffering the sensorial (optic, sonic, haptic) as generative dimensions and grammars with which to approach the archive.

Phenomenal!

[Ben Bieser · Rating 5 out of 5]

grammar is everything. even looking leverages syntax. don't look at me like that.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely. A journey into feeling and hearing images that should resonate with those attempting to wrangle archives of memory and conscription that were assembled to register and code black bodies as objects, issues or typologies.

Although short, what Campt opens before us is the registering of images and a theoretical key to playing future stories--whether in our own minds or on paper.

[Abby]

I’m still chewing on this book, marking it finished when I think there is more to glean. There are a number of arguments and ideas at play here, some of which may be carrying over from her previous work, which I haven’t read. One is the “grammar of futurity” that has to do with “quotidian practices of refusal” embodied by people in photographs. The ways that people insist on their lives and humanity, even in photographic contexts that are designed to deny them. And there is plenty to chew on there. But her other foundational critical tool is “listening to” or “feeling” images, engaging with what she calls their “lower frequencies” and “haptic qualities”. Which, I’m sorry, I can only call hippy dippy. I’m probably just too literal for this kind of nuance, because photographs…they don’t make sounds, even low ones, or if they do, that’s not really what she’s talking about here. What she’s talking about is something important that, it’s true, is not really covered by the sensory description of “looking at” or even “watching” a photograph. What she’s talking about has to do with context, but even that word seems thin and oversimplified. I understand why she reaches for sensory words to describe the way photos strike you differently when you reach outside their official contexts (often dehumanizing serialized photographic projects of the state, and often overlooked or forgotten) to juxtapose them with other photos of the same time and place or with a knowledge of their sitters that comes from outside the frame and occasion of the photograph. Because that’s really what’s happening, and it yields incredible fruits. That method of analysis does position the sitters and their strategies for survival differently than they might first appear. It demonstrably changes the affect (not effect), the meaning and emotional response the photos evoke (did I use the word right?), as I experienced myself while reading. Part of the goal is to bring the focus from a 2-D representation back to actual bodies, both the person in the photograph and the one viewing it. So I understand why the sensory words for hearing and touch are getting used. I just kinda wish we could admit they’re metaphorical and focus on the other, slightly less confusing explanations she offers.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Methodologically so rich. Juxtaposition of visual archives, adding context (visual, historical, legal, sometimes from a separate time or place, often through a different mode), perceiving (sonically or haptically) gestures of refusal (refusal of "the terms of impossibility that define the black subject" 113; refusal not just as resistance or agency, but as insistence on black futurity through a "grammar of fugitivity") in what would otherwise be read as purely compulsory/subordinated photographs from across what Campt terms the African Diaspora. Chapter 1's juxtaposition of a vernacular photo essay alongside passport photos of Black subjects taken roughly in the same time and place is particularly strong for me, as is Chapter 2's argument that, in ethnographic portraits taken of Indigenous Black women in early 20th century South Africa, their poses can be read not as stillness or immobility, but as "stasis," as "tensions produced by holding a complex set of forces in suspension," (51) making audible "uncomfortable frictions...[of the] visual economies in which these images circulated" (59). Also, the pages are beautifully smooth and creamy and weighted, and the prose is clear. The book is short, but no less powerful for it.

[T.R. Ormond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tina M. Campt hits her mark perfectly in this very brief, but very rewarding read. Her insistence on the the future real conditional and its connection to freedom is essential reading. The more people who have an appreciation of this concept, the better. It is an idea that reaches out into life from between the covers of her book.

Just to explain, since grammatical terms are quite elusive to us these days, the future real conditional is the verb tense that refers "to a future that has not yet happened but must." (17) It describes "what will have had to have happened." It is the power to imagine beyond the fact of now and envision what is not, but what must be. In the context of Campt's discussion, this is a verb tense about justice.

[mad · Rating 4 out of 5]

"the challenge of black feminist futurity is the constant and perpetual need to remain committed to the political necessity of what will have had to happen, because it is tethered to a different kind of "must". it is not a "must" of historical certainty or Marxist teleology. it is the responsibility to create one's own future as a practice of survival. the future real condition is an essential component of a black feminist praxis of futurity as an existential grammatical practice of grappling with precarity, while maintaining an active commitment to the every labor of creating an alternative future."

[mimo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was assigned to read this for a class. Although I find Campt's arguments insightful, not to mention more relevant than ever before in the America of today, I must confess that her language can veer across the border between erudite and pretentious.

It's a certain register unique to feminist and postcolonial thinkers, which generally makes me confused and sceptical as much as it enlightens me. For instance, I find the central concept of listening to images (rather than merely looking at them) a good metaphor for the work Campt does in these four powerful chapters, but the way she writes about it also makes me narrow my eyes, raise my eyebrows and tilt my head.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a fascinating read. I'm thinking about how to narrate archives of slavery and Campt's methods - fugitive readings, listening to the "low frequencies" that emerge from images of figures from the black diaspora - are incredibly helpful. There are times her sentences are long and wordy but the process of decoding them is itself informative. Definitely a scholar whose work I'll be following going forward.

[Michaela Y-M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. What a fantastic book, both theoretically and practically grounded in images, frequencies, and listening. Particularly, Campt’s foundational outline of the quiet//quotidian and stasis will stay will me as I continue to look at and analyze images.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting proposition that images have different frequencies. Strangely the images are not really analysed in the book and most of them are only captioned at the back of the book. Disappointing and a bit slight.

[Cassey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great in helping me articulate some thoughts on photography.

[Hanneke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting case studies and the coda is superb.

[John White · Rating 5 out of 5]

So brilliant, particularly when it dives into a memoir-like mode with reflections on the physicality of working in archives. Campt writes with stunning beauty.

[Virginia Downing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant methods and analysis in one book. I’m in love

[Aaron Badgley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a brilliant and unique book, combining history, photography and so much more, from a Feminist perspective. Brilliant.

[Phillip Pyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

wasn't theory pilled when i read this at 19, but i'm SO GLAD i re-read it. some of the most brilliant methodology i've seen in awhile

[izzy scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

unreal

[Gugu Goxo · Rating 5 out of 5]

through the first chapter.

[Miguel Fernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quick read--highly recommend for anyone considering alternative methodologies to understanding vernacular photography/the archive--incredible interventions all through beautiful prose

[lalo🌸 lover of books · Rating 5 out of 5]

phenomenal

[dylan jozkow · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful

[Ruari Paterson-Achenbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

an incredible text! I'm so glad I made my way through the whole book! I've taken so much from this text, but more than anything it's the commitment to finding revolutionary potential in the everyday. Love Tina x

[Mills College Library]

779 C199 2017

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

👂🏾🤚🏽📷🖼👁🗄🛃🚹