Work in Progress

1. T.M. Campt. Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe. 2008.

   Abstract:
   Image Matters charts the emergence of a Black European through the medium of photography in the early twentieth century. It counterposes two different Black European communities – Black Britons and Black Germans – and the respective ways each community used photography to create positive forms of identification and community in the first half of the twentieth century in ways that challenged the racist stereotypes Blacks in Germany and the UK confronted in their everyday lives. Focusing on a collection of snapshot photographs of four Black German families from the turn of the century through the 1940s, and a little known archive of studio portrait photography of Afro-Caribbean Britons in the immediate postwar period, the study uses the photographic image to understand the effects of migration and settlement, and the construction of national, cultural and diasporic identity in these communities. The book asks how and why everyday practices of photography became an important medium through which Afro-Germans and Black Britons wrote themselves into narratives of British and German culture.