Passports 2012–2025

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