When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World
When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World
by Leigh Raiford
Duke University Press, 2026
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-1-4780-2986-1
Paper: 978-1-4780-3331-8
eISBN: 978-1-4780-9462-3 (OA)
eISBN: 978-1-4780-6206-6 (standard)
About the Book
In When Home Is a Photograph, Leigh Raiford asks how Black people use photography to make home in the world. Raiford focuses on a selection of Black American activists and artists, including Marcus Garvey, James Van Der Zee, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver to explore the complex relationship between racialized subjects and the medium of photography. As they traveled the world for study, for work, for pleasure, or for survival, these artists and activists took and collected photographs to express their political platforms and personal sense of self. Raiford considers the everyday image-making practices that these Black Americans employed to improve the condition of Black lives globally by imagining, identifying, inhabiting, leaving, defending, and destroying “home.” When Home Is a Photograph shows how these figures did not merely utilize photography to emplace themselves in the world—they demonstrated how the use of photography is itself a way to mediate one’s relationship to the world.
About the Author
Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography.
Reviews
“It is impossible to read Leigh Raiford’s tour de force and ever think of world-making without the image ever again. When Home Is a Photograph is not just a masterpiece for the history of photography, black studies, and the humanities, it is a landmark necessary to understand the extraordinary act now seen as an everyday encounter—how photography allows us to craft a home in the world.”
-- Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and African and African American Studies, Harvard University
-- Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and African and African American Studies, Harvard University
“A major contribution to visual studies focusing on concepts of reimagining home as it explores how Black people throughout the diaspora used photography to make ‘home’ despite displacement and migration. Raiford draws on the archives of activists, writers, artists and photographers to invite us to consider political and familial connections and the unseen in imaging home. It’s as burdened by conflicted histories, as it is rich with possibilities of love, and a captivating read.”
-- Deborah Willis, New York University
-- Deborah Willis, New York University
Tags
The Visual Arts of Africa and its Diasporas, Blackness, Photography Artistic, Aesthetics Black, African American photographers, Photograph, Black Studies (Global), Photography, World, Political aspects, Social aspects, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, United States, Social Science, History
Open Access Information
Label: University of California Libraries
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Loading...