Studio Salon: When Home Is a Photograph

Join us for a dialog with students Leigh Raiford and Salamishah Tillet celebrating the discharge of Raiford’s new guide, When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging within the World, revealed by Duke University Press. In When Home Is a Photograph, Leigh Raiford asks how Black individuals use images to make house on the planet. Raiford focuses on a number of Black American activists and artists, together with Sadie Barnette, Dawoud Bey, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Marcus Garvey, Eslanda Goode Robeson and James Van Der Zee to discover the advanced relationship between racialized topics and the medium of images.

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies on the University of California, Berkeley, the place she teaches, researches, curates and writes about Black visuality and world-making. Raiford is the writer of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011), When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging within the World (April 2026); co-author with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024); and Series Editor with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis of Vision and Justice, an imprint of Aperture Books. Raiford has written concerning the work of a variety of modern artists together with Dawoud Bey, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Toyin Ojih Odutola, for a spread of publications. Most not too long ago, Raiford was named the 2026 Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing by the Gordon Parks Foundation.

Salamishah Tillet is an instructional and creative polyglot whose work strikes throughout cultural criticism, public artwork, and social justice. She presently serves because the Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and is a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributing critic-at-large on the New York Times. She is the writer of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy within the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (2012) and In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (2021). She is finishing a story nonfiction work, Nina Simone and the World She Made, forthcoming in February 2027. Tillet has led a number of main public artwork initiatives, together with the A Call To Peace exhibition in Military Park and the “Who Will Be My Monument” mural within the Four Corners Historic District in Newark. Tillet, in collaboration with photographer Scheherzade Tillet, will exhibit Outside Looking In, Black Girlhood (2026) on the Gordon Parks Foundation, for which she obtained the 2025 Gordon Parks Foundation’s Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing.