[Providence, RI] Brown University Digital Publications has launched the multimodal edition of Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual, the inaugural title in the On Seeing series published by the MIT Press. Authored by Kimberly Juanita Brown, inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College, Mortevivum is a powerful examination of the unsettling history of photography and its fraught relationship to global antiblackness. 

With subject matter that may be triggering, particularly images of violence and harm done to Black bodies, the open access multimodal edition employs a Consentful Tech framework, or the intentional development and use of technology to create safety, to prioritize care, and to foreground consent in order to mitigate trauma.

Readers are given agency in determining how and for how long they view challenging images. No images of dead bodies have been included, at least not in their original form. Exploring a space between evidence and erasure, the BUDP design team deeply considered how to transform these images for various audiences. An icon indicates that viewers may opt to see more of an altered image, but only if they choose to do so. This innovative treatment of bodies borrowed heavily from the Carrie Mae Weems cover art, creating a haunting confrontation that attempts to rewrite harm into regard.By including images that do the work without doing the damage, the multimodal edition introduces a new form of visual literacy that comes through agency. Indeed, Colin Edgington, writing for Aperture, calls the book “a necessary addition to the archive of photographic thought. It will change the way readers look at images of all kinds.”

The multimodal edition also offers readers a Community Engagement Toolkit, a guide to having open conversations about antiblackness, visual culture, and death. Other uniquely digital content includes video recordings of author Kimberly Juanita Brown in dialogue with Brown University professors Kim Gallon, Juliet Hooker, Kevin Quashie, and Avery Willis Hoffman; and with Vievee Elaure Francis of Dartmouth College.

Publications in the On Seeing series foreground the political agency, critical insight, and social impact inscribed in visuality and representation. The MIT Press will publish each On Seeing volume as a print book, ebook, and open access multimodal edition created by Brown University Digital Publications. The next title in the series is Black Elegies: Meditations on the Art of Mourning.

Brown University Digital Publications — a collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, generously launched with support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services — creates exciting new conditions for the production and sharing of knowledge. Brown partners with leading scholarly publishers to ensure that these groundbreaking works are validated via rigorous academic review and reach the broadest possible audience for the greatest possible impact. Widely recognized as accessible, intentional, and inclusive, Brown’s novel, university-based approach to digital content development is helping to set the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age.