Passports 2012–2025 presents an intimate body of work by Keisha Scarville taken
from an ongoing series centred around her father’s earliest passport photograph.
The artist has reinterpreted the photograph over three hundred times to date,
each iteration reworked and collaged with varying materials and found imagery –
paints, beads, photograph fragments of Black bodies, gold leaf, glitter – to
form a deeply textured act of photomontage. Interwoven with the passport works
are archival images taken between the 1960s and 1980s in Guyana and New York
City, where her father settled in the US, his self-portraits, Scarville’s own
photographs of him and of Guyana’s striking landscape, and short transcripts of
their conversations. Together these works excavate untold histories and disrupt
the false neutrality of the passport image in an interrogation of citizenship
and personhood, absence and materiality. Drawing on all these strands, the book
examines and reimagines diaspora, bureaucratic images, and the archive, asking
what it means to understand a person, especially a loved one, through an image.
With a new text by Tina M. Campt, Professor of Humanities at Princeton
University
