Passports presents a deeply intimate body of work by Keisha Scarville, drawn from an ongoing series centred on her father's first passport photograph. To date, the artist has reinterpreted this image more than three hundred times, transforming it through collage and the incorporation of various materials and found images, including paint, beads, photographic fragments of Black bodies, gold leaf and glitter. The result is a complex exercise in photomontage, rich in texture and meaning.
These reinterpretations of the passport photograph are interwoven with archival images taken between the 1960s and 1980s in Guyana and New York, the city where her father settled after emigrating to the United States. The book also includes her father's self-portraits, photographs taken by Scarville of both him and the striking landscapes of Guyana, and brief transcripts of conversations between them.
Together, these works recover previously hidden histories and question the supposed neutrality of identification photography, exploring concepts such as citizenship, individual identity, absence and the materiality of images. Drawing on all these elements, the book examines and reinterprets diaspora, bureaucratic images and photographic archives, posing a fundamental question: what does it mean to come to truly know a person, especially a loved one, through a photograph?
Includes a new text by Tina M. Campt, Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.
