Abstract
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. Organized into two substantive parts, the book unpacks the significance of two distinctive photographic archives of diasporic black populations in Europe. One encompasses amateur snapshots of black German families gathered across the time period 1900–1945, while the other draws inspiration from studio portraits of West Indian migrants taken between 1948 and 1960 in Birmingham, England, and now housed in the photographic collections of the Birmingham City Archives. Campt reads these two collections as enacting forms of national and cultural belonging among black populations for whom such modes of membership were, for historically and politically distinct reasons, in jeopardy or flux.
Under the premise that, in these two particular contexts, the choice to be photographed or “imaged” was motivated by the photographic subject’s imagination, that is to say, impelled by the desire to be seen or emplotted in a particular way, Campt situates the photograph as a contested site of black cultural formation. As such, she works against the grain of an extensive European legacy within nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography once impelled by the ethnographic impulse to culturally contain and racially typologize black subjects. Campt instead seeks to liberate the photographic subjects at hand by acknowledging the agency and social aspiration displayed therein. Rather than framing subjects of the African diaspora in order to suggest their difference and enact separation, these photographic artifacts function to consolidate community. As a volitional act, posing for a photograph may effectively communicate and render visible for an attentive contemporary viewer (with an historian’s eye for contextual cues) something about how self, community, and home were actively created.
Part one displays continuities with but also strikes new ground in relation to Campt’s previous book, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2005). Family snapshots that offer singular evidence of the survival of Afro-German individuals during the Third Reich here become the site for performing what Nicholas Mirzoeff has referred to in his as the racial index. Campt makes a case for what she refers to as the haptics of domestic photography, conceptualizing touch as a force of attachment and sentiment in photos in which Afro-German children or youth pose in bodily contact with other family members: embraced, for example, by the arm of a grandmother. 1 Childhood photos of the biracial Hans Hauck with white family members testify to prewar assumptions about the nature of familial belonging. Hans Hauck’s presence in a group photo of Hitler youth, in which several Nazi flags dominate the rear wall of the room, in turn, unsettles our assumptions about the homogeneity of the raced national body. A later photo of Hauck in uniform with two other German soldiers also named Hans, in turn, enacts a peculiar contradiction: while their uniforms were associated with a politics of racial homogeneity, these assumptions are unsettled by chromatic differences that render the national body all the more performative.
Especially original is Campt’s approach to diasporic studio portraiture, which she reads as an expressive cultural practice. Caribbean migrants to Britain paid dearly to have their photos taken to produce images that could circulate among West Indians in their home country as evidence of their prosperity and their integration. Campt reads these images as evincing what Raymond Williams once coined “structures of feeling”: here, aspirations toward middle-class existence conveyed through the choice bound up with self-representation: hairstyle, clothing, bodily pose, and accessories such as a purse or cigar. The sheer volume of such photos stored for posterity speaks to the popularity of this method of identity formation; given their original purpose as circulating objects, Campt regards these photos as linking individuals across space to enact community. She enacts a veritable synesthesia when drawing upon musical paradigms to enunciate the visual organization of serial portraiture. Rhythm and composition facilitate her explanation of how these photos “work”: “Their movement is marked by a rhythm that is rooted in their seriality, not as a litany of identical performances, but as repetitions that both individuate and register in synchrony within a larger score” (p. 151).
As Campt acknowledges in her introductory chapter, the topic of family photography carries a personal charge for her. If her study hereby gains emotional depth, it also sustains theoretical breadth, with Campt forging highly productive and original interpretive frameworks for the study of vernacular photography. Anecdotes from her own family history in Washington, DC, establish points of contact to the study at hand, and frame her engagement with the photographic archives of diasporic populations abroad. In the process, much weight is brought to bear in her study on the term indexicality, whose vexed history in photographic theory arguably remains underexamined. The performative nature of viewer interpretation and the role projection plays in analyzing the haptics of photographic viewing is, instead, performatively evinced through her own investment in the topic. What the image provokes in “us” is thus also contingent on who “we” are, and how our life experiences define the parameters of visible evidence. Campt has produced a work of scholarship daringly subjective and intellectually provocative, that will surely come to be recognized as a peer to the work of her mentor Marianne Hirsch, whose Family Frames (Harvard University Press, 1997) continues to shape scholarly inquiry into the interrelationship between family photographs, memory work, and history.