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# Books allies can read. Part Two, Photography and the power of the visual
- URL: https://www.theblkgze.com/books/books-allies-can-read-part-two/
- Published: 2025-04-06T08:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T15:39:29.000Z
- Description: Photography does not simply record what is there. These books ask who gets to look, what images make visible, and what histories remain outside the frame.
- Author: Shaun Connell
- Tags: Books

Before you can change what photography shows, it helps to understand how photography has learned to look.

In [Part One](https://www.theblkgze.com/books/books-allies-can-read-part-one/), we began with the person doing the looking. Race, history, power, identity and experience all shape the assumptions we bring to the world. Part Two turns that attention towards the camera.

Photography is often treated as though it simply records what is there. But photographs are made within histories. They carry the assumptions of their makers, the institutions that commission and circulate them, the archives that preserve them and the audiences that interpret them.

For Black people, this history is particularly consequential. Photography has been used to classify, control, exoticise and distort Black bodies, while Black photographers have continually challenged those ways of seeing and created others.

The books in this list explore that tension. They ask who gets to look, who gets to be seen, what photographs can tell us, what they leave out and what happens when the terms of looking begin to change.

### 1\. Tina M. Campt - *A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See*

**ISBN:** 978-0262546058

Campt examines contemporary Black artists who challenge conventional ways of seeing and asks what becomes possible when looking is approached differently.

The book is useful because it moves the idea of the Black gaze beyond representation. It is not simply about putting Black people into the picture. It is about questioning the assumptions through which pictures are made and understood.

For theBLKGZE, that distinction is fundamental.

![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2025/04/61RzEaC8nBL._SL1500_.jpg)

### 2\. *Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue*

**ISBN:** 978-1636810454

Bringing together the work of two photographers deeply engaged with Black life, memory, history and representation, this book offers a conversation between two distinct photographic practices.

It is worth spending time with not simply for the photographs themselves, but for what they reveal about the possibilities of looking at people with attention, complexity and care.

Different photographers can photograph related histories without producing the same understanding.

![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2025/04/71ssh8Pf3PL._SL1000_.jpg)

### 3\. *Dawoud Bey - On Photographing People and Communities* 

**ISBN:** 978-1597113373

Bey considers the practical and philosophical questions involved in photographing people and communities.

The book is particularly useful for thinking about relationship. What happens between photographer and subject? What does it mean to photograph someone without reducing them to an idea? How does a photographer make space for another person's presence rather than simply using that presence to construct an image?

These are photographic questions, but they are also questions of responsibility.

![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2025/04/61GzzO7W3HL._SL1200_.jpg)

### 4\. Mark Sealy - *Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time* 

**ISBN:** 978-1912064755

Sealy examines photography's relationship with colonialism, race and power, while considering how contemporary photographers challenge inherited visual structures.

The importance of this book lies in its insistence that the camera has a history. Photography did not emerge outside politics. Its conventions were shaped alongside systems of classification, empire and racial hierarchy.

To understand contemporary images, it helps to understand some of what came before them.

![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2025/04/61Ie5NgmFHL._SL1360_.jpg)

### 5\. Tina M. Campt - *Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe*

**ISBN:** 978-0822350743

Campt examines photographs of the African diaspora in European archives and considers how Black subjects appear within collections that were not necessarily created to centre their experiences.

The book opens up questions about presence and absence. What does an archive preserve? What does it overlook? What happens when people begin to read photographs against the assumptions that originally placed them there?

An archive is never simply a collection of photographs. It is also a history of what someone decided was worth keeping.

![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2025/04/61lxqunE5aL._SL1360_.jpg)

### 6\. Tina M. Campt - *Listening to Images*

**ISBN:** 978-0822362708

Rather than focusing on what images show, Campt invites us to listen to what they *do*. Drawing on sound, movement, and affect, she radically reimagines how we engage with archival photography, particularly images of the Black diaspora.

![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2025/04/917-VIeDylL._SL1500_.jpg)

### 7\. *M*ark Sealy - Photography: Race, Rights and Representation

**ISBN:** 978-1913546335

This collection considers photography's relationship with race, representation and justice, bringing together critical perspectives on the ways images have shaped racial narratives.

It is useful for anyone wanting to understand photography as something more consequential than an aesthetic practice. Photographs participate in how people are understood. They can become evidence, shape public opinion and enter historical memory.

What a photograph shows matters. So does what happens to it afterwards.

![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2025/04/517Von8O0JL._SL1000_.jpg)

### 8\. Amy sall - *The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power*

**ISBN:** 978-0500025390

Sall brings together African image makers and considers the gaze as a site of power, creativity and self determination across photography and cinema.

The book expands the conversation beyond the familiar question of who is represented. It asks what happens when African artists establish their own visual languages rather than working within inherited ones.

That shift from representation towards authorship is central to understanding why who is behind the camera matters.

A book to look beyond photography

![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2025/04/61mCZJMuDDL._SL1200_.jpg)

### 9\. Koyo Kouoh *\- When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting*

**ISBN:** 978-0500025888

This book moves outside photography altogether, bringing together a century of Black figuration in painting. That distance is useful.

Photography does not exist in isolation from other visual cultures. Looking at how Black artists have represented Black life through painting can loosen some of the expectations we place on photographs. It reminds us that Black visual culture has never depended on a single medium or a single way of seeing.

Sometimes the best way to rethink photography is to look elsewhere.

![](https://www.theblkgze.com/content/images/2025/04/91Uq5n4FlDL._SL1500_-1.jpg)

These books will not give you a correct way to look. That is not their purpose.

They offer something more useful: reasons to question the authority we often give photographs, the histories behind the images we encounter, the assumptions carried by photographers and institutions, and the things an image might communicate that cannot be reduced to what is immediately visible.

[Part One](https://www.theblkgze.com/books/books-allies-can-read-part-one/) asked you to examine what you bring to the world.

Part Two asks you to examine what happens when those assumptions meet a camera.

Who gets to look? Who gets to be seen? What becomes evidence? What gets remembered? What disappears?

The more closely you look at photography, the harder it becomes to believe that seeing is simply seeing.

Perhaps that is where looking begins to change.