The Royal Anthropological Institute has awarded Professor Tina Campt the 2024 Photographic Studies Prize.

The award ceremony will take place at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London on January 30. 

Following the award presentation, Campt will read an extract from her latest book project Art in a Time of Sorrow, which tells the story of how, in the midst of the pandemic, writing about art became a survival tactic that helped Campt grapple with intense experiences of personal grief during a period of pervasive social grievance.

The Royal Anthropological celebrated Campts powerful contribution to and impact on photographic studies, saying:

"Campt has published five books and received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020). Her influential book, Image Matters (Duke University Press 2012) traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt’s study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of 'race' in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities."