African American Studies professor discusses how pictures shapes Black visions of house in new guide

We usually consider pictures as a option to look again at historical past. But for UC Berkeley African American Studies Professor Leigh Raiford, {a photograph} can even function a option to construct a future. 

In her new guide, “When Home Is a Photograph,” printed this April by Duke University Press, Raiford explores how Black activists and artists — from Marcus Garvey to Kathleen Neal Cleaver — used the digicam to do extra than simply document their lives. They used it to “make home” in a world that always denied them a way of place. By shifting her focus to the personal snapshots of household and exile, Raiford reveals how pictures serves as a significant software for claiming belonging and imagining freedom.

Professor Raiford joined UC Berkeley in 2004 after incomes a bachelor’s diploma in African American Studies and Women’s Studies from Wesleyan University, alongside together with her PhD from Yale University’s joint program in African American Studies and American Studies. “When Home Is a Photograph” marks their second book, following “Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle.”

Berkeley Social Sciences spoke with Raiford to debate the position of pictures in articulating the Black diaspora, the affective energy of household albums and what it means to make a house on the planet.

Your guide explores how Black individuals have used pictures to “make home in the world.” What first impressed you to discover this query, and the way does the title When Home Is a Photograph mirror that concept?
Leigh Raiford: Initially, I sought to grasp how pictures articulates the Black diaspora, a venture that culminated in my co-edited assortment, “Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture” (2017). This work highlighted how Black our bodies and pictures journey and remake identification throughout historical past. However, whereas writing “When Home is a Photograph,” I spotted my topics weren’t photographing ‘diaspora’ as an idea, however have been visualizing house. Influenced by the pandemic and geographer Katherine McKittrick’s “Black sense of place,” I now view pictures as an imagined geography — a software for claiming house and belonging the place it has been traditionally withheld or dispossessed.

You write about figures like Marcus Garvey, James Van Der Zee, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver. Can you inform us slightly bit about what drew you to those specific people?
Leigh Raiford: Each of those figures are individuals whose work I love, whose political and private journeys I discover fascinating and instructive, and whose photographs are deeply evocative for me. Activist Marcus Garvey and photographer James Van Der Zee have been initially meant for my first guide, however I felt like they belonged to a special story. My obsession with anthropologist and activist Eslanda Goode Robeson started by means of a colleague’s advice. Law professor, human rights activist and former Black Panther Party Communications secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver approached me to assist arrange her private archive. During the pandemic, I discovered myself considering deeply concerning the work of photographer Dawoud Bey and hometown hero, artist Sadie Barnette. 

Many of the individuals you write about have been continually touring. How did pictures assist them navigate displacement and form political or political visions of house? 
Leigh Raiford: At its most elementary, the act of constructing {a photograph} is a recognition and declaration of presence: I’m right here, we’re right here. The which means(s) we connect to that presence usually comes later. Whether it was the Pan-African networks of Garvey or the worldwide travels of anthropologist and creator Eslanda Goode Robeson, making and deploying photographs of household and neighborhood served as a gesture of ‘home.’ Their cameras allowed them to map out freedom and reclaim a way of place even whereas in fixed movement or going through displacement. 

What was probably the most shocking {photograph}, archive, or story you found through the course of?
Leigh Raiford: By far, probably the most shocking side — and really the best reward — of this guide venture was working with Cleaver. Starting in 2016, I led a crew to arrange and digitize her private archive of over 2,000 photographs — a group relationship again to the 1870s that finally discovered a house at Emory University’s Rose Library.

While doing the archival work, I additionally targeted on a household album compiled through the Cleavers’ exile in Algeria and France (1969-1973) following the police capturing of 17-year-old Bobby Hutton. This artifact chronicles the International Section of the Black Panther Party alongside the intimate domesticity of a household in flux. Watching Kathleen interact with these photographs underscored that pictures is an affective medium and a significant narrative software for articulating Black life.

What do you hope readers take away from the guide?
Leigh Raiford: I need readers to see pictures as a medium of chance. Historically pictures has been a software of trauma, in addition to a web site of refusal and pleasure. In this guide I need to emphasize pictures as means for experimentation and a option to study concerning the world. Secondly, I hope to mannequin a observe of ‘close looking.’ In an period the place our consideration is commodified and we’re pressured to eat trauma on autoplay, slowing down is an act of resistance. Ultimately, this guide is a love letter to Black pictures and the worlds it permits us to think about.