Description: Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening to photography by engaging with lost archives of state identification photographs of Afro-diasporan people taken between the late 1800s and the present, showing how to hear the quiet refusal emanating from these photos originally intended to dehumanize and police their subjects.
Review Quotes: "[Campt's] work is particularly noteworthy for her ability to translate still images into moving narratives, to carry the reader through the image. Campt's archive for Listening to Images is made of photos that one might pass over when looking for a more spectacular story. These include modes of identification photography--mugshots, passport photos--that reveal the apparatus of state control without its spectacular action or violence. These images are the low-tech precursor to the current proliferation of biometrics, the practice of tracking unique identity markers like DNA. Campt's turn away from crisis brings the spectacle into perspective. She attends to the long backdrop of the eruptions of supposedly exceptional violence that is far too often overlooked, but is always present."
--JB Brager "The New Inquiry"