Listening to Images

In Listening to Images, Tina M. Campt presents an innovative approach to engaging with photography by "listening" to images. She delves into historically overlooked photographs of Black subjects across the African diaspora, such as late 19th-century ethnographic portraits, early 20th-century prison photographs from Cape Town, postwar passport photos from Birmingham, England, and 1960s mug shots of Freedom Riders. Campt proposes that these images, originally intended to control and dehumanize, resonate with subtle expressions of resistance, anticipation, and the performance of futures yet to unfold. By intertwining discussions on fugitivity, Black futurity, and Black feminist thought, she reinterprets these colonial tools, uncovering moments of refusal and imagination embedded within them.