Image Matters

"In this lucid and meticulously argued book, Tina M. Campt questions the way we see and understand race by examining family photographs of black Europeans. Her detailed readings of studio portraits, snapshots, and orphaned images engage the multiple sensory registers on which images solicit and touch us. In our encounters with these photographs of belonging, displacement, and exclusion, we are reminded why images matter." - Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route

"None of the riveting photographs in Image Matters are what they first seem. As Tina M. Campt's analysis unfolds, the images of black diasporic communities in Europe are revealed to be infinitely complex. They complicate accepted narratives and link to larger questions about the nature of historical evidence and the historical process. Ultimately, they become a prism for thinking about the diasporic condition itself, drawing attention to the diversity of black experience and to the ways that diaspora involves not only movement but also staying put." - Elizabeth Edwards, author of The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918

“Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities. . . . I have family photos throughout my home, but after reading Image Matters, this thought provoking book, I will never look at them the same. They now seem to take on a life of their own beyond just images. This is a book that I highly recommend, especially from a scholarly perspective.” - Dennis Moore, EUR/Electronic Urban Report

“Campt offers a compelling study of how ‘engaging the photograph as a dynamic and contested site of black cultural formation’ and belonging leads to insights about representation extending well beyond substantive particularities. In prose readily accessible to undergraduates, she adapts current theories concerning the intentionality of photography, "image-making as a collective and relational practice of enunciation," and "haptic visualities" to case studies of black German and British identity formation. . . . Recommended.” - A.F. Roberts, Choice

“Image Matters offers historians (and other people) a fascinating and thought-provoking set of case studies and guide to productive ways of reading photographs, as well as to thinking about our own response to them.” - Eve Rosenhaft, German History

 “Image Matters is highly engaging, and Campt’s employment of multiple methodologies is adroit and interesting. . . . The book is an important addition to Africana / Afro-Caribbean Studies and Cultural and Media Studies. More precisely, Campt makes a critical scholarly contribution to how we conceive of the African Diaspora.” - Nicosia Shakes, Callaloo

“In Image Matters, historian Tina M. Campt demonstrates how photographs have been deployed to produce racialized subjects, as well as how photographs are expressive cultural texts that reveal much about how the diaspora formed  and was formed by  culture.” - Janel C. Atlas, Cultural Studies

“Campt offers some finely grained and perceptive readings of the images as she persuasively argues that the photographs show that the Afro-Europeans pictured in them found places in families and circles of friends, an argument that carries most weight with respect to the Afro-German children in the Third Reich.” - Timothy L. Schroer, Central European History

“Tina Campt’s recent monograph achieves an authorial tone both deeply personable and strikingly engaging for the intellect. Her research contributes to the emerging field of black European studies through an interdisciplinary engagement with the intersecting discourses of photography, diaspora, and race. . . . Campt has produced a work of scholarship daringly subjective and intellectually provocative.” - Angelica Fenner, Journal of Family History