A Black Gaze

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.

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.

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