Listening to Images: A Salon in Honor of Tina Campt

Featuring Tina Campt, Nicole Fleetwood, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman, and Deborah Thomas

What happens when we shift our way of engaging with photography? When we go beyond looking at images and, instead, listen to them? Tina Campt, director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, delves into lost archives of historically dismissed photographs to deepen our understanding of the lives of black subjects throughout the black diaspora. Campt invites us to open our ears to photographs of rural African women in the late 19th-century and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders, and to hear in them the quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation of a boldly imagined and more just future.

This event was recorded on September 14, 2017 at Barnard College