Mortevivum

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: living death—mortevivum—in a series of still frames that refuse a complex humanity. In Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us 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.

Photography's history, inextricably linked to colonialism and white supremacy, is a catalog of othering, surveillance, and the violence of objectification. In the genocide in Rwanda, for instance, photographs after the fact tell viewers that blackness comes with a corresponding violence that no human intervention can abate. In Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, photographic “evidence” of its sovereign failure suggests that the formerly enslaved cannot overthrow their masters and survive to tell the tale. And in South Africa and the United States, a loop of racial violence reminds black subjects of their lower-class status mandated via the state. Illustrating the global nature of antiblackness that pervades photographic archives of the present and the past, Mortevivum reveals how we live in a repetition of imagery signaling who lives and who dies on a gelatin silver print—on a page in a book, on the cover of newspaper, and in the memory of millions.

The URL for this publication is https://on-seeing-mortevivum.org/.CONTENTS

SERIES FOREWORD IX
INTRODUCTION: THE MAKING OF PHOTOGRAPHIC BLACKNESS XI

1 THE EMPIRE 1
2 THE VIEWER 47
3 THE SENTIMENT 73 
CONCLUSION: WE, STILL 103


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 117
NOTES 123
INDEX 139Included in Publishers Weekly's Spring 2024 Announcements
included in Choice's list of forthcoming titles in art and architecture
Included in Aspire Design and Home Magazine's roundup of new and noteworthy titles celebrating Black art and design
Included in Print's Design and Culture Reads for Black History Month

"Mortevivum is a shock to the system delivered with incendiary grace. Brown makes visible the latency—or veiling—of the Black experience of photography and the disseminated image through media. Her critical perspective moves across the shared history of postcolonial Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. She writes about these moments and their reverberations in a way that conjures today’s realities. The book feels present, even when the photographs and histories tell us of well-trod pasts."
—Aperture

“Kimberly Juanita Brown’s monograph Mortevivum, the first title from the On Seeing book series launched by the MIT Press in 2022, unpacks the proximity of death and Blackness opera­tionalized by the scopic regimes of documentary photography...Mortevivum is memorable for its multi-striated argumentative flow and incisive critical study driven by a proclamation that, in the author’s words: ‘We will continue to exceed the frame of the photograph.’”
—Philosophy of Photography “Across three chapters and the time and space of Kimberly Juanita Brown’s 'cartographies of the ocular,' we encounter her painstaking forensic attention to the join of photography and antiblackness, to these devastating photographs, to how black people in our fungibility become the dead we see and simultaneously unsee—constrained by the medium of our dis/appearance. Cogent, beautifully conceived and written, and utterly convincing, Mortevivum is an instruction, like the poetry of Clifton and Trethewey, in how one might stay with and make present the black living and the dead. Mortevivum is a profoundly necessary work, one that enacts regard. This is the book I have been waiting for.”
—Christina Sharpe, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, York University, Toronto; author of Ordinary Notes
 
“‘This is how you make a gelatin silver print.’ So begins Kimberly Juanita Brown’s insistent instructive poetic demanding book, as if to say this is how you can read, look, behold. Brown’s thinking about photography collates the apparatus, its ideological limits, its enactments—a forceful study through an archive of images, texts, and poems. Shuttling across black diasporic contexts—South Africa, Rwanda, Haiti, the United States—Brown unearths ‘cartographies of the ocular,’ asserting that 'when photography and antiblackness are conjoined, black people become the dead that we see.' The intelligence here sears into heart what is impossible and terrible about visualizing blackness. And still, Mortevivum charts a path for us to read, see, feel, think, and look more intelligently—from the slurred violences of the visuality commonly fit to print, to the possibility of blurs that 'reflect our interior lives while leaving room for the exigencies of movement, stillness, and time.' It is daunting and necessary, this seeing the living death all around us; it is astonishing, this visual and critical and literary archive Brown mobilizes for our better seeing.”
—Kevin Quashie, Professor of English, Brown University; author of Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being


“Kimberly Juanita Brown’s book brilliantly demonstrates how, since its inception, photography’s white users and operators have turned it into a site where racialized bodies are left unshielded, captives, of viewers who are trained to see as white how gratuitous black death is reaffirmed in a multitude of photographic frames. What unfolds is an inspiring potential history—a call to recognize what Brown calls “the living thing” that is photography, which is delineable from “the dead offering,” the outcome of white supremacy. An important achievement.”
—Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture & Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, author of Potential History: Unlearning ImperialismKimberly Juanita Brown is the inaugural director of the Institute for Black Intellectual and Cultural Life at Dartmouth College where she is also an Associate Professor of English and creative writing. She is the author of The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary.