Meet the keepers of Black images’s archives

In Accra, artists, archivists, collectors, and students gathered for an inaugural symposium that requested learn how to protect Black photographic historical past and what care really seems like

When Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and her co-organiser, NYU professor Dr Emilie Boone, had been growing the title for his or her inaugural symposium on Black photographic archives, it was practically titled To Collect & Collate: The Unsung Keepers of Black Photography. 

However, the phrase “unsung” was scrapped within the preliminary phases. “We quickly had to ask ourselves,” Barrayn remembers, “unsung to whom? These keepers have always been known to their own communities.” That edit, whereas seemingly minor, was essential to the organisers in rethinking what the archive means in up to date tradition. “It’s not just a formal space in a museum or an institution; it’s a living practice that happens across all spaces,” she explains to me. 

Hosted at NYU Accra, Ghana, between 10-12 March, 2026, the symposium introduced collectively a spread of individuals engaged in preserving reminiscence, from tutorial students and artwork historians to neighborhood archivists and relations. Over three days, they gathered to honour the archive as an establishment whereas analyzing its assumptions, ethics, previous and future, particularly inside a decolonial, African context. “For us, this ‘memory work’ is deep within the heritage of people of African descent,” Barrayn explains to me. “It hasn’t just been a hobby or a professional choice; it has been a crucial part of our survival for a very long time.”

Barrayn, a documentary photographer and professor at Rutgers University, has spent years eager about the photographic archive and its myriad capabilities. For her, the photographic historical past and its archive are “simultaneously liberatory and violent.” Every iteration of how images is produced,” she argues, “reveals the ways it was deployed as a tool.” The archive, then, isn’t a impartial repository however a file of “the psyche of a time: the concerns of the people, the problems they sought to solve, the gains they hoped to access, and the values they held dear.” It is that this expansive nature of the photographic archive that underpinned the programme for the symposium which included displays by famend cultural employees, artists and teachers, web site visits to archives and analysis centres within the metropolis and interviews performed between panellists.

“As a co-organiser alongside Emilie Boone, my approach was less about filling slots and more about curating a vital conversation. I started with a ‘wish list’ of earnest practitioners, including Dr Kenneth Montague, Amy Sall, Paul Ninson, and Dr Leigh Raiford, whom I trusted to be the perfect thought partners for this convening,” shares Barrayn. “My goal was to bring together people who were not only active in scholarship, exhibitions and institution building  but who were also deeply embedded in the community.”