RAI Photographic Studies Award
Thursday 30 January at 5:00pm (GMT), followed by a drinks reception
Register here for the Zoom event: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vL6mPtEeTfmg_vYlFZPHTg
Register here to come in Person to the RAI: https://buytickets.at/royalanthropologicalinstituteofgreatbritain/1523508
The Royal Anthropological Institute is proud to award
the 2024 Photographic Studies Prize to Professor Tina Campt
Speaker: Professor Tina Campt, Princeton University
Chair: Professor Christopher Pinney, University College London
After the presentation of the award Professor Campt will read an extract from her latest book project, Art in a Time of Sorrow which tells the story of how, in the midst of the pandemic, writing about art became a survival tactic that helped Campt grapple with intense experiences of personal grief during a period of pervasive social grievance.
Biographical Note:
Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University where she holds a joint appointment between the Department of Art and Archeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She is one of the founding scholars of Black European Studies, and her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe and southern Africa, with an emphasis on the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt’s more recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in black diasporic communities and the interventions of black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies. Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers.
Campt has published five books and received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020). Her influential book, Image Matters (Duke University Press 2012) traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt’s study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of “race” in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.
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