Event held via Zoom • Registration Link

In this talk from her forthcoming book, Leigh Raiford examines how Black people use photography to make home in the world. She focuses on a selection of Black American activists and artists, (Marcus Garvey, James Van Der Zee, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Dawoud Bey, Sadie Barnette) 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.” Raiford 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.

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), When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (forthcoming, 2026) and, co-author with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024). Most recently, Raiford is Series Editor with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis of Vision and Justice, an imprint of Aperture Books.

Event image credit: Artwork by Sadie Barnette. Bio pic by Annette Hornischer.