Guest Room: Tina Campt & Keisha Scarville

Guest Room aims to spark collaboration. Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina Campt, who is a Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, has decided to join forces with photo-based artist Keisha Scarville.

To guide your submissions for this Guest Room, they have developed the following framework: "Poetics of Darkness."

As both a technological medium and a rich modality of cultural expression, photography is both taught and theorized as a manipulation of light, specifically, how photographers respond and position themselves, their cameras, and subjects in relation to light. It is in this way a practice that implicitly seeks to move away from darkness. What would it mean to embrace a counter-intuitive understanding of photography that inverts this structuring logic? Put differently, rather than focusing on how light interacts with the subject, what would it look like to focus on how photographic subjects interact with and respond to darkness and shadow? What might it look like to engage darkness as itself an active site of illumination? And what would it mean to activate shadow in ways that make darkness resonate?

"We are interested in images that activate shadow and darkness not as a negative void, but as dynamic and expressive space. We encourage the submission of images that explore multiple implications of shadow as a poetics, as action (verb, adverb, agent), as active rather than passive, and as charged rather than inert. We welcome imaginative photographs that bend our vision toward a capacious embrace of darkness rather than light."