Listening to Images

Listening to Images explores the lower frequencies of transfiguration enacted at the level of the quotidian, in the everyday traffic of black folks with objects that are both mundane and special: photographs.

attachment, identification photos are not produced at the desire of their sitters. They are images required of or imposed upon them by empire, science, or the state. The unexceptional format of identification photos and the routinized nature of bureaucratic images frequently lead to a failure to read or a blanket dismissal of them altogether, as we

This book proposes a haptic mode of engaging the sonic frequencies of photographs. It offers an alternate take on “watching” photos that materializes their transfigurations, albeit not in the form of statements of fact or as narratives of transit or mobility.

We must thus attend to the muscular tension imaged in these portraits as a performance of stillness4 that holds the complex forces that surrounded and produced these images temporarily at bay or in equilibrium.

Engaging these images as decidedly haptic objects is a method that requires us to interrogate both the archival encounter, as well as the content of archival collections, in multiple tenses and multiple temporalities and in ways that attend to both their stakes and possibilities.

sound need not be heard to be perceived. Sound can be listened to, and, in equally powerful ways, sound can be felt; it both touches and moves people.3 In this way, sound must therefore be theorized and understood as a profoundly haptic form of sensory contact.

The tense of this haptic temporality resounds in the anteriority of the future subjunctive: “If you are ever released, you will still be ours.”

“the power of the state’s criminal system against itself … hijacking the booking process, enabling the state to produce its own strategic blunder, its own tragic actions.” They enact instead powerful forms of subversion. “They give us a chance to take the measure of these men and women in the very heat of battle, and perhaps to take measure of ours

Listening to Images reclaims the photographic archive of precarious and dispossessed black subjects in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by attending to the quiet but resonant frequencies of images that have been historically dismissed and disregarded.