Sublime

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.

identification photography. These photos are produced predominantly for the regulatory needs of the state or the classificatory imperatives of colonization.

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.

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.

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.

Here again, listening to images is constituted as a practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our senses to the other affective frequencies through which photographs register.

quiet must not be conflated with silence.

how Blackness is selectively celebrated (and contained) within the white imagination.

Burned by hand into its face were four unsettling words: “The Book of Innocents.”