Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781478033318

Table of Contents

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 ""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

“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 “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

Author Information

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.

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