Keisha Scarville: Passports 2012–2025

Keisha Scarville: Passports 2012–2025
Category: Photographer Monographs & Art Books
Author: Keisha Scarville
Publisher: MACK
Publication Date: May 2026
Print Length: 2026 pages
Language: English
Price: paid paid paid

Keisha Scarville: Passports 2012–2025 gathers more than a decade of sustained inquiry by Keisha Scarville into a single, intimate publication. At its core lies her father’s earliest passport photograph—an image meant to function as neutral proof of identity. Scarville returns to this small bureaucratic portrait again and again, transforming it into a site of meditation, rupture, and repair. Through over three hundred reinterpretations, the once-static likeness becomes a living archive.

Each iteration is materially distinct. Scarville collages the original image with paint, beads, fragments of photographs depicting Black bodies, gold leaf, and glitter. Surfaces are layered, obscured, and reassembled, shifting the passport photo from administrative document to textured reliquary. What is typically standardized and impersonal becomes tactile and devotional. In these gestures, Scarville challenges the authority of state-issued imagery, exposing how such photographs flatten complex lives into legible data while claiming objectivity.

The book interweaves these altered passport works with archival photographs made between the 1960s and 1980s in Guyana and New York City, tracing her father’s migration and settlement in the United States. His own self-portraits appear alongside Scarville’s images of him and of Guyana’s luminous landscapes. Brief transcripts of their conversations punctuate the visual narrative, offering glimpses of memory, distance, and shared reflection. Together, these elements complicate the notion of citizenship, suggesting that belonging cannot be contained within the tight frame of a passport image.

With a newly commissioned text by Tina M. Campt, Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, Passports 2012–2025 situates Scarville’s project within broader discussions of diaspora, archives, and Black visuality. The publication ultimately asks what it means to know a person—especially a parent—through photographs. By reworking a single image into countless forms, Scarville affirms that identity is never fixed, but continually shaped by memory, movement, and love.

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