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.

Author: Tina M. Campt
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 03/21/2023
Pages: 232
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 7.87h x 5.98w x 0.55d
ISBN: 9780262546058

About the Author
Tina M. Campt, Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, is Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Her books include Listening to Images, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, and Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis).