We often think of photography as a way to look back at history. But for UC Berkeley African American Studies Professor Leigh Raiford, a photograph can also serve as a way to build a future.
In her new book, “When Home Is a Photograph,” published this April by Duke University Press, Raiford explores how Black activists and artists — from Marcus Garvey to Kathleen Neal Cleaver — used the camera to do more than just record their lives. They used it to “make home” in a world that often denied them a sense of place. By shifting her focus to the private snapshots of family and exile, Raiford reveals how photography serves as a vital tool for claiming belonging and imagining freedom.
Professor Raiford joined UC Berkeley in 2004 after earning a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies and Women’s Studies from Wesleyan University, along 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 discuss the role of photography in articulating the Black diaspora, the affective power of family albums and what it means to make a home in the world.
Your book explores how Black people have used photography to “make home in the world.” What first inspired you to explore this question, and how does the title When Home Is a Photograph reflect that idea?
Leigh Raiford: Initially, I sought to understand how photography articulates the Black diaspora, a project that culminated in my co-edited collection, “Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture” (2017). This work highlighted how Black bodies and images travel and remake identity across history. However, while writing “When Home is a Photograph,” I realized my subjects weren’t photographing ‘diaspora’ as a concept, but were visualizing home. Influenced by the pandemic and geographer Katherine McKittrick’s “Black sense of place,” I now view photography as an imagined geography — a tool for claiming space and belonging where it has been historically withheld or dispossessed.
You write about figures like Marcus Garvey, James Van Der Zee, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver. Can you tell us a little bit about what drew you to these particular individuals?
Leigh Raiford: Each of these figures are people whose work I admire, whose political and personal journeys I find fascinating and instructive, and whose images are deeply evocative for me. Activist Marcus Garvey and photographer James Van Der Zee were originally intended for my first book, but I felt like they belonged to a different story. My obsession with anthropologist and activist Eslanda Goode Robeson began through a colleague’s recommendation. Law professor, human rights activist and former Black Panther Party Communications secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver approached me to help organize her personal archive. During the pandemic, I found myself thinking deeply about the work of photographer Dawoud Bey and hometown hero, artist Sadie Barnette.
Many of the people you write about were constantly traveling. How did photography help them navigate displacement and shape political or political visions of home?
Leigh Raiford: At its most fundamental, the act of making a photograph is a recognition and declaration of presence: I am here, we are here. The meaning(s) we attach to that presence often comes later. Whether it was the Pan-African networks of Garvey or the global travels of anthropologist and author Eslanda Goode Robeson, making and deploying images of family and community served as a gesture of ‘home.’ Their cameras allowed them to map out freedom and reclaim a sense of place even while in constant motion or facing displacement.
What was the most surprising photograph, archive, or story you discovered during the process?
Leigh Raiford: By far, the most surprising aspect — and truly the greatest gift — of this book project was working with Cleaver. Starting in 2016, I led a team to organize and digitize her personal archive of over 2,000 images — a collection dating back to the 1870s that eventually found a home at Emory University’s Rose Library.
While doing the archival work, I also focused on a family album compiled during the Cleavers’ exile in Algeria and France (1969-1973) following the police shooting of 17-year-old Bobby Hutton. This artifact chronicles the International Section of the Black Panther Party alongside the intimate domesticity of a family in flux. Watching Kathleen engage with these images underscored that photography is an affective medium and a vital narrative tool for articulating Black life.
What do you hope readers take away from the book?
Leigh Raiford: I want readers to see photography as a medium of possibility. Historically photography has been a tool of trauma, as well as a site of refusal and joy. In this book I want to emphasize photography as means for experimentation and a way to learn about the world. Secondly, I hope to model a practice of ‘close looking.’ In an era where our attention is commodified and we are forced to consume trauma on autoplay, slowing down is an act of resistance. Ultimately, this book is a love letter to Black photography and the worlds it allows us to imagine.
