When Home Is A Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World
Friday, Sept. 18 at at 12 pm EST • 9 am PST • 5 pm GMT
Event held via Zoom • Registration Link
Photography Network membership is required to attend.
Cover of When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World.
Please join us on Friday, Sept. 18 at 12 pm to hear from Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Leigh Raiford as she explores how Black people use photography to make home in the world.
Abstract:
Leading scholar of photography, Leigh Raiford, will discuss her new book, When Home Is A Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (Duke UP, 2026). In When Home Is a Photograph, 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, Kathleen Neal Cleaver and Dawoud Bey, to consider 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.
Speaker Bio:
Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates, and writes about Black visuality and world-making. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011), and, co-author with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024). Raiford is Series Editor with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis of Vision and Justice, an imprint of Aperture Books. In 2026, the Gordon Parks Foundation named Raiford their 2026 Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing.