Historians too often fail to use photographs successfully in their works. Photographs frequently appear merely as illustrations rather than serving as evidence used to illuminate the past. In part historians' shortcomings in dealing with photographic sources stem from real challenges in gleaning meaning from images. Tina Campt, a historically minded Professor of Africana and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, focuses her attention on a select number of photographs of people of African descent in Europe during the twentieth century to determine what they can reveal. She seeks to use the photographs to address a large number of questions, but her principal concern is “to understand the complex relationship between how black people image and how they imagine themselves” (p. 5).

Campt offers no simple answer to this challenging question. The ambiguity in the book's argument must be partly attributed to the opacity of the images under consideration, and Campt notes that she has “comparatively little information about many of the photos” (p. 7). Beyond the difficulty of pinning down the multivalent and unclear meanings of many of the photographs, however, the work's thesis is also difficult to summarize because Campt's own arguments are somewhat equivocal. In ruminating on the appropriateness of calling a photograph of a black woman whose name is unknown a “found” image, for example, Campt observes that her own focus on the photograph's subject makes it a “found” image, before writing, “Perhaps, but also quite the contrary” (p. 82). The chapter's analysis of the image concludes with further questions without clear answers.

The book is structured according to the photographs under consideration. The first half of the book, which likely will interest readers of this journal most, focuses on snapshots of Afro-Germans taken during the years between 1900 and 1945. Chapter one incorporates previously published photographs of Mandenga and Ekwin Ngando, two Afro-Germans, but centers on photographs of Hans Hauck, an Afro-German child of a German mother and an Algerian father stationed in the occupied Rhineland. Hauck's fascinating story was recounted in Campt's 2004 book Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich. He was born in 1920, joined the Hitler Youth, suffered sterilization at the hands of the Nazi regime as part of its campaign against those it called the “Rhineland bastards,” and served in the Wehrmacht. Chapter two analyzes images of Harry Davis, an Afro-German son of a German woman and her husband, an immigrant from Liberia, as well as photographs of Fasia Jansen, another Afro-German subject of Campt's Other Germans. In part two, the book shifts its focus to a large number of formal photographic portraits of West Indians taken over the years from 1948 to 1960 in Birmingham, England. Although both halves of the book deal with pictures of Afro-Europeans, they do not fit seamlessly together.

Campt offers some finely grained and perceptive readings of the images as she persuasively argues that the photographs show that the Afro-Europeans pictured in them found places in families and circles of friends, an argument that carries most weight with respect to the Afro-German children in the Third Reich. The central place in photographs of the Afro-German Hans Hauck among his white German family members, Campt explains, “constitutes him as both an integral part of this family and as an Afro-German subject” (p. 50). Campt's interpretation of the portraits of members of the West Indian community in Birmingham emphasizes that the images reflected aspirations to middle-class respectability and prosperity. The numerous formal photographs of subjects in their suits or dresses offer persuasive evidence to support Campt's argument.

Certain aspects of the work limit the power of Campt's interpretations of the photographs. The book is very heavy on photographic theory. The prose in many places does more to signal Campt's immersion in the scholarship on photography than it does to clarify the meaning of the sources. In this vein Campt asserts that the “portraits have a sonic structuring that is revealed in generative ways by music” (p. 141) and she attempts to read them as music. The metaphor ultimately pays limited interpretive dividends. Campt writes in a highly personal style. The book begins with Campt recounting a visit to her aunt's home during which her aunt shared a number of family photographs with her. It ends not with a conclusion summarizing the argument but instead an “epilogue” that recounts her experiences surrounding her mother's death and funeral. Between the chapters reading the photographs of Afro-Germans and Anglo-West Indians, “interstitial” sections describe Campt's ties with her own African-American family and her experiences with other photographs, personal material intended to illuminate the processes by which Campt encountered the sources and reflected on them (p. 20). Campt explains that she chose not to include photographs of her own family because the enormous emotional charge they carry made it impossible for her to read them as effectively as she does the images in the book. Campt argues that her relationship to her family and its photographs supports her claim that “photographs are extremely affective objects” (p. 202), but on balance the personal stories distract from the analysis.

Historians of Afro-Germans will want to examine the photographs included in this book and read Campt's analysis of the images for a modest addition to the existing historical literature on Afro-Germans. Historians of Germany, however, are not the principal audience for the book, which will appeal mainly to scholars of the African Diaspora and photography.