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    A Black Gaze

    Artists Changing How We See

    Author Tina M. Campt
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    $24.95 US
    The MIT Press
    On sale Mar 21, 2023 | 232 Pages | 9780262546058
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    Examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see--and see Blackness in particular--anew.

    In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work--from Deana Lawson's disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa's videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Kahlil Joseph's films and Dawoud Bey's photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson--requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity.
     
    Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of looking at to the active struggle of looking with, through, and alongside the suffering--and joy--of Black life in the present. The artists whose work Campt explores challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice: the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. These artists create images that flow, that resuscitate and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways. Writing with rigor and passion, Campt describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.
    Prelude to a Black Gaze 1
    Verse One
    The Intimacy of Strangers 27
    Verse Two
    Black (Counter)gravity 43
    Verse Three
    The Visual Frequency of Black Life 77
    Verse Four 
    The Slow Lives of Still-Moving-Images 109
    Verse Five
    Sounding a Black Feminist Chorus 145
    Verse Six
    Adjacency and the Poethics of Care 167
    Reprise 
    The Haptic Frequencies of Radical Black Joy 193
    Acknowledgments 203
    Notes 207
    Index 215
    Tina Campt, a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archaeology and Visual Arts Program, and Director of Atelier at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the lead convener of the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics and the Practicing Refusal Collective, and the recipient of the 2024 Photographic Studies Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute for distinguished contributions to the study of anthropology and photography. She is the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University Michigan Press, 2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), and most recently, A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021). Her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020), was named Photography Catalogue of the Year by Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation.
    Tina M. Campt View titles by Tina M. Campt

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    Examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see--and see Blackness in particular--anew.

    In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work--from Deana Lawson's disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa's videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Kahlil Joseph's films and Dawoud Bey's photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson--requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity.
     
    Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of looking at to the active struggle of looking with, through, and alongside the suffering--and joy--of Black life in the present. The artists whose work Campt explores challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice: the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. These artists create images that flow, that resuscitate and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways. Writing with rigor and passion, Campt describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.

    Table of Contents

    Prelude to a Black Gaze 1
    Verse One
    The Intimacy of Strangers 27
    Verse Two
    Black (Counter)gravity 43
    Verse Three
    The Visual Frequency of Black Life 77
    Verse Four 
    The Slow Lives of Still-Moving-Images 109
    Verse Five
    Sounding a Black Feminist Chorus 145
    Verse Six
    Adjacency and the Poethics of Care 167
    Reprise 
    The Haptic Frequencies of Radical Black Joy 193
    Acknowledgments 203
    Notes 207
    Index 215

    Author

    Tina Campt, a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archaeology and Visual Arts Program, and Director of Atelier at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the lead convener of the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics and the Practicing Refusal Collective, and the recipient of the 2024 Photographic Studies Award from the Royal Anthropological Institute for distinguished contributions to the study of anthropology and photography. She is the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University Michigan Press, 2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), and most recently, A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021). Her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020), was named Photography Catalogue of the Year by Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation.
    Tina M. Campt View titles by Tina M. Campt

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    A Conversation Between Gabriela Bueno Gibbs and Victoria Hindley of the MIT Press Acquisitions Team on Tina Campt’s Newest book, A Black Gaze

    Last week, the MIT Press published A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See by Tina Campt, examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see—and see Blackness in particular—anew. Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of “looking at”

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    A Conversation Between Gabriela Bueno Gibbs and Victoria Hindley of the MIT Press Acquisitions Team on Tina Campt’s Newest book, A Black Gaze

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