Passports presents an intimate body of work by Keisha Scarville taken from an ongoing series centred around her fathers 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, Scarvilles own photographs of him and of Guyanas 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
Keisha Scarville weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography; Studio Museum in Harlem; Huxley-Parlour, London; ICA Philadelphia; Contact Gallery, Toronto; Lightwork; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; Higher Pictures; and Webber Gallery, LA. Recent group exhibitions include the 2nd Bienal das Amazonias (2025); Les Rencontres DArles (2025); and The Rose at the lumber room, Portland (2023). In 2025, she co-curated To Conjure, a group exhibition of contemporary photographic artists at the International Center of Photography alongside senior curator Elisabeth Sherman. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, George Eastman House, Denver Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has participated in residencies at Lightwork, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, WOPHA, Baxter Street CCNY, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her first book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound, was published by MACK and shortlisted for the 2023 Paris PhotoAperture PhotoBook Award.
