Listening to Images by Tina M. Campt (review)

Listening to Images is a creative and compelling study of the archive, a strikingly original and intentional interrogation of what author Tina M. Campt refers to as the "visual archive of the African Diaspora" (3). Based on the scholar's extensive primary research in archives throughout the diaspora—including England, South Africa, Holland, and the U. S.—and her thoughtful firsthand encounters with photographic collections featuring pictures of African people and people of African descent, Listening to Images offers a rich new model for experiencing archives and engaging and understanding photographs. Focused on the genre of identification photography—regulatory or compulsory photographs typically tied to colonial and/or state projects of classification, her book's central question is an urgent one of archival practice:

How do we contend with images intended not to figure black subjects, but to delineate instead differential or degraded forms of personhood or subjection—images produced with the purpose of tracking, cataloging, and constraining the movement of blacks in and out of diaspora?

(3)

With this pressing query at its core, each of her book's chapters examines a subset of the genre of identification photography. Chapter one focuses on a collection of recently discovered passport photos of Afro-Caribbean migrants in postwar Birmingham, England. Chapter two features a set of ethnographic portraits of rural African women produced in the late nineteenth century by Christian missionaries in South Africa's Eastern Cape. Chapter three focuses on convict photos, specifically late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of men imprisoned in Cape Town's Breakwater Prison.

Fully committed to moving beyond "simply" looking at these charged photographs and viewing what is visible to the trained eye, Campt approaches these photographic images with multiple senses attuned and an embodied awareness of—and an openness to feeling and perceiving—their affective properties and possibilities. Especially interested in the realm of sound, which she understands as "a sensory register that is critical to Black Atlantic cultural formations" (6), she intently attends to what she calls "the sonic frequency of images" (71), the ways images register on multiple—sometimes invisible and inaudible—levels.

In so doing, the interdisciplinary scholar both develops and models a new way of approaching and interpreting identification photographs. Tapping the tools of juxtaposition, contextualization, refocusing, reframing, and embodied multisensory listening—and intricately engaged with the contemporary discourses of "fugitivity" and "futurity"—Campt takes a fresh approach, what she calls "a counterintuitive approach" (5), to these often overlooked, typically formulaic, and seemingly "quiet" photographs. Her aim is twofold: to better understand the deeply dehumanizing forces that produced them and to encounter and relate to their subjects more holistically and humanely than their producers, with their instrumental intentions, ever imagined.

In her first chapter "Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity," Campt engages a collection of found passport photos now held at the City Archives in Birmingham, England. Reading these photographs of Caribbean migrants alongside a contemporaneous photo-essay of a neighborhood where many members of Birmingham's postwar Afro-Caribbean community lived, she looks beyond what is visible in these standard-issue passport photos—"the faces, postures, and poses of subjects seeking permission for transit and border crossing" (43)—and instead listens to them on another frequency. Contextualizing these studio-made photographs within social history and diasporic memory, she sees in these pictures something beyond their intended function. In them, she also perceives a courageous quest "to claim the right to move and dwell" and "to create new forms of home and belonging" (75), and, in this way, to imagine and begin to inhabit a new and necessary future as citizen and subject.

In this first chapter, Campt foregrounds the concept of quiet, reminding us that "quiet must not be conflated with silence" (6) and that attending to—and working to animate—the lower registers of sound is central to the urgent project of simultaneously interrogating systems of dispossession and negation and actively listening to black subjects in the archives. For as she explains: "Quiet registers sonically, as a...