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A Review of “Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe”

During a quiet moment around the time of World War II, a photograph was taken of a proud mother, armin-arm with her son—a black man in uniform, swastika prominent on his sleeve. This affective and jarring photograph, Tina Campt argues in her beautifully produced work, Image Matters, is not so different from a studio photo taken a decade or so later in Birmingham, England, of a dapper AfroCaribbean immigrant sporting fashionable and respectable clothes, umbrella prominently hooked over his left arm, in a postwar uniform, of sorts. Campt employs a wealth, perhaps surfeit, of theory to make sense not of these individual images but of the archive, or set of images, they comprise. She argues convincingly that German vernacular photos of daily life and British posed studio portraits both express “black people’s complex relationship to cultural identity and national belonging” (5). Reading these images far beyond the frame, Campt engages with them as “sites of articulation and aspiration; as personal and social statements that express how ordinary individuals envisioned their sense of self, their subjectivity, and their social status” (7). The first part of the book focuses on some three dozen images of just a few individual Afro-Germans photographed from the interwar years through World War II. Campt brilliantly and problematically reads these images not “as evidence or confirmations of biographical data or historical context . . . . [but] as complex aesthetic texts and affective objects,” not unlike traditional works of art (86). Emphasizing the “haptics” (touch) of the images, including both the social life of the photographs and, more convincingly, the subjects photographed, Campt complicates our understanding of the acceptance of blacks in the racially exclusive Nazi regime, and she challenges us to consider whether the African diaspora is less about migration than about national belonging. Indeed, the compelling photographs reproduced in the book—not individually but as a series, Campt emphasizes—show AfroGermans touching and hugging family and friends, demonstrating intimacy and acceptance in “sites of everyday sociality” (98). Yet, the Nazi state violently sterilized these same black subjects, crimes far outside the frame of the camera, but ones Campt described in her first book, Other Germans (2005). Just three years after the war, Britain became a more inclusive society, at least on the surface: in 1948 it granted citizenship to Commonwealth subjects and allowed for relatively unrestricted immigration. Until 1962, when immigration was restricted, Afro-Caribbeans flowed into Britain, many settling in Birmingham. Immigration was not always welcomed, nor was it easy, and contemporary photojournalism readily sensationalized the “narrative of diasporic discontent” (190). Black immigrants, however, constructed their own narrative, Campt argues, and it was articulated in the photos they had taken of themselves at the Dyche Photography Studio in Birmingham. The Dyche archive comprises nearly 10,000 images, mostly unidentified portraits. Campt wades into this vast archive and pulls out some sixty representative images to “reconceptualize and indeed revalue the seriality of studio portraiture . . . [to reveal an] expressive cultural practice” (139). To do this, Campt reads the archive of images like music, tying “the visual to the sonic” and examining the rhythm, pattern, and affect of the photos, essentially “scoring” the images (139). The “jingle” that Campt sees and hears enunciated in the portraits is that of Afro-Caribbeans projecting respectability and prosperity in their new home, a message meant not just for themselves, but also for their families back home who would receive the photos. In a very perceptive reading of the images, Campt argues that the immigrants were wearing not just their Sunday best, but their best with an aspirational attitude, that of “disaporic self-making” (168). As with the images in Germany, so with the portraits in Britain; diasporic subjects were representing belonging. Campt’s reading of images is more than perceptive, and she makes a fine case for theorizing how “photographs function as images and as practices of social and cultural enunciation that exceed their biographical details” (196). This work is not entirely convincing, though; her metaphors and musical scoring of photographs can lead one beyond the frame of the image to where evidence is scanty and conclusions more an artifact from the metaphor than from the archive. Second, this is a deeply personal work; Campt articulately expresses her many feelings about visiting exhibits and even about finding her own family’s photographic archive. Many may find this a distraction, even disturbing in an academic work, but, even when she is most self-reflective, Campt asks thoughtful questions about photographs and, thus, provides us with a master class in thinking about images and how to write about them.