Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual
by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing, Dartmouth College
The inaugural title in the On Seeing Series is Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness.
Since photography’s invention, black life has been presented as fraught, short, agonizingly filled with violence, and indifferent to intervention. In Mortevivum, author Kimberly Juanita Brown demonstrates how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable. Brown traces this idea from the earliest images of the enslaved to the latest newspaper photographs of black bodies, from the United States and South Africa to Haiti and Rwanda, documenting the enduring, pernicious connection between photography and a global history of antiblackness.
This is the book I have been waiting for.
