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1212 Can Photographs tell the Story of Black History and the Black Present? Tina Campt is a historian who has turned to photography and visual culture to tell stories of black lives that have been left out of the history books. She spoke to Caroline Molloy about her work. CM: First of all, I would like to ask you how you would like to introduce yourself for this piece? Your professional self? TC: My professional self is a little schizophrenic because I come to my position and my research through various routes. I have a PhD in German history and I began my career as an Intellectual Historian who then became a Social and Oral Historian in order to do the work that I did on black Germans. Then, based on those oral histories, I was invited to curate an exhibition that was showcasing those life histories. That led me to photography because I found that photography told their stories even more vividly through a different medium. So I find it important to emphasise that I’m not a scholar trained in either the history of photography or art history or media studies. I am theorist who has come to photography and visual culture because it speaks to people and speaks for people in ways that animate what they think of themselves in a different way than language and text. In my work I engage photography and visual culture as a textual formation but I think it’s a formation that also demands other kinds of engagement as well. So professionally, that is where I am. I define myself as a black feminist theorist of visual culture. The visual culture that I’ve been trying to understand more recently is contemporary art by black artists. And more formally, I am a professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, as well as a Research Associ- ate at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. CM: How does it work with your post in America and your research associate position in Johannesburg? TC: The research associateship is not something that’s remunerated but it’s an affiliation that I find important and useful because it allows me to bridge multiple communities. I’ve been connected with researchers, activists and artists in South Africa through this appointment. Before, you described my work as focused on migration, and I describe my work as focused on diaspora and those are slightly different formations. Diaspora is something that is less about movement and more about connections – across different boundaries and territories and communities. It’s about those connections rather than the movements between those different sites, even though there is movement there. The affiliation with South Africa is incredibly important to me because it allows me to have the kinds of conversations about the value of visual culture for black communities between and among different black communities. CM: You have published three books that segway together beautifully: The Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory (2004), Image Matters (2012) and Listening to Images (2017). In
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Tina Campt interview the first of these you speak about the politics of memory work. Could you tell us a little bit more about this? TC: That’s the last chapter. The preceding chapters focus on the oral histories of two black Germans, a man and a woman, who lived through the Nazi regime. There I used historical documentation to tell a story about how we are supposed to understand black Germans in this period and then I allow these narrators to tell their own story which in a lot of ways contradicts this. The last chapter, the one that you are talking about, is where I inserted myself into the conversation in ways that made more visible the fact that these were dialogues. I was the person who they were talking to when they were giving their accounts and I did not want to erase the fact that these were conversations they were having with an African American woman. And that that made a difference in how they were representing themselves. It’s something I call ʻintercultural addressʼ. They would address me as an African American woman in order to make certain things clear about how our lives as racialised and gendered subjects were similar and at the same time quite different. They thought I would understand something about what they were saying, based on being a racialised subject, but at the same time they wanted to make clear to me that there were differences in the way in which we understood our respective experiences. There was always in these conversations this kind of floating unspoken thing that sometimes would get referenced as: ‘Well you as an African American, you might see it this way, I don’t see it this way’, or ‘You as an African American will understand this because we share these things’. I was trying to show in the chapter that in the context of these interviews and in research interviews in particular, there was also another dimension that has to do with how we represent ourselves to our interlocutors. In my interviews my interlocutors made certain discursive representations based on their assumptions about who I am and my experiences as an African American woman, and how best to convey their stories to me. They were creating certain kinds of bridges in order to be able to come to a common understanding of the meaning of what they were saying. The chapter was about how we make that visible within historical accounts and I was trying to show the subjective perspective of the individuals we research has a role in the way we understand history. image courtesy of Fasia-Jansen-Stiftung CM: In Image Matters you looked at two quite dif- ferent archives in Europe. Could you explain your thought process and a little bit about the kinds of archives you looked at. TC: There were no images in Other Germans; it was about their testimony and their memory narratives. But I eventually came into possession of some of their family photographs, as well as those of other Afro-Germans who were their contemporaries. So the starting point of that book was an exhibition I did where I was trying to present their narrative accounts of their lives to an audience that was not reading them. One of the observations that I had 13

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1212

Can Photographs tell the Story of Black History and the Black Present?

Tina Campt is a historian who has turned to photography and visual culture to tell stories of black lives that have been left out of the history books. She spoke to Caroline Molloy about her work.

CM: First of all, I would like to ask you how you would like to introduce yourself for this piece? Your professional self? TC: My professional self is a little schizophrenic because I come to my position and my research through various routes. I have a PhD in German history and I began my career as an Intellectual Historian who then became a Social and Oral Historian in order to do the work that I did on black Germans. Then, based on those oral histories, I was invited to curate an exhibition that was showcasing those life histories. That led me to photography because I found that photography told their stories even more vividly through a different medium. So I find it important to emphasise that I’m not a scholar trained in either the history of photography or art history or media studies. I am theorist who has come to photography and visual culture because it speaks to people and speaks for people in ways that animate what they think of themselves in a different way than language and text. In my work I engage photography and visual culture as a textual formation but I think it’s a formation that also demands other kinds of engagement as well. So professionally, that is where I am. I define myself as a black feminist theorist of visual culture. The visual culture that I’ve been trying to understand more recently is contemporary art by black artists. And more formally, I am a professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, as well as a Research Associ-

ate at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

CM: How does it work with your post in America and your research associate position in Johannesburg? TC: The research associateship is not something that’s remunerated but it’s an affiliation that I find important and useful because it allows me to bridge multiple communities. I’ve been connected with researchers, activists and artists in South Africa through this appointment. Before, you described my work as focused on migration, and I describe my work as focused on diaspora and those are slightly different formations. Diaspora is something that is less about movement and more about connections – across different boundaries and territories and communities. It’s about those connections rather than the movements between those different sites, even though there is movement there. The affiliation with South Africa is incredibly important to me because it allows me to have the kinds of conversations about the value of visual culture for black communities between and among different black communities.

CM: You have published three books that segway together beautifully: The Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory (2004), Image Matters (2012) and Listening to Images (2017). In

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