As a crucial extension of its ongoing investigation of vernacular photography, the Walther Collection has collaborated with key scholars and critical thinkers in the history of photography, women's studies, queer theory, Africana studies, and curatorial practice to interrogate vernacular's theoretical limits, as well as to conduct case studies of a striking array of objects and images, many from the collection's holdings.

In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. She hears in these photos—which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders—a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.

Campt explores the affective resonances of two archives of Black European photographs for those pictured, their families, and the community. Image Matters looks at photograph collections of four Black German families taken between 1900 and the end of World War II and a set of portraits of Afro-Caribbean migrants to Britain taken at a photographic studio in Birmingham between 1948 and 1960.

'Living as Form' grew out of a major exhibition at Creative Time in New York City. Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a 30-person curatorial advisory team; each project is documented by a selection of colour images.

An almanac to the world of Gilles Peress' Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, delineating the decades of conflict in Northern Ireland In Annals of the North, New York-based photographer Gilles Peress (born 1946) and writer and lawyer Chris Klatell combine essays, stories, photographs, documents and testimonies to open up for the reader the complicated and contradictory storylines that emerged from the conflict in the North of Ireland. Weighed down by 800 years of colonization but only the size of Connecticut (with half its population), Northern Ireland provides a remarkably intimate stage set. Interweaving text and image, Annals of the Northexamines the multifaceted struggle between Irish Republicans and Nationalists, Protestant Unionists and Loyalists, and the imperial British, to explore broader themes of empire, retribution and betrayal, as well as the tense dialectic between the ordinary demands of everyday life and periodic explosions of violence. The book is at once wide-ranging yet deeply personal and political, alternately dense and humorous, legal and literary.

The Millennium Dome, Braveheart and Rolls Royce cars. How do cultural icons reproduce and transform a sense of national identity? How does national identity vary across time and space, how is it contested, and what has been the impact of globalization upon national identity and culture?This book examines how national identity is represented, performed, spatialized and materialized through popular culture and in everyday life. National identity is revealed to be inherent in the things we often take for granted - from landscapes and eating habits, to tourism, cinema and music. Our specific experience of car ownership and motoring can enhance a sense of belonging, whilst Hollywood blockbusters and national exhibitions provide contexts for the ongoing, and often contested, process of national identity formation. These and a wealth of other cultural forms and practices are explored, with examples drawn from Scotland, the UK as a whole, India and Mauritius. This book addresses the considerable neglect of popular cultures in recent studies of nationalism and contributes to debates on the relationship between ‘high' and ‘low' culture.

In 2010, more Americans lived below the poverty line than at any time since 1959, when the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting this data. In 2011, Kira Pollack, Director of Photography at 'TIME', commissioned photographer Joakim Eskildsen to capture the growing crisis, affecting nearly 46.2 million Americans. Based on census data, the places with the highest poverty rates were chosen when Eskildsen, together with journalist Natasha del Toro, traveled to New York, California, Louisiana, South Dakota, and Georgia over seven months to document the lives of the people behind the statistics. The people Joakim Eskildsen has portrayed are people who struggle to make ends meet, who have lost their jobs or homes, and often live in unhealthy conditions. They usually remain invisible in the American society to which the myth of the American Dream is still very strong. Many of the people held there was no such dream anymore, merely the American Reality.