Studio Salon: When Home Is a Photograph

Join us for a conversation with scholars Leigh Raiford and Salamishah Tillet celebrating the release of Raiford’s new book, When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World, published by Duke University Press. In When Home Is a Photograph, Leigh Raiford asks how Black people use photography to make home in the world. Raiford focuses on a selection of Black American activists and artists, including Sadie Barnette, Dawoud Bey, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Marcus Garvey, Eslanda Goode Robeson and James Van Der Zee to explore the complex relationship between racialized subjects and the medium of photography.

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about Black visuality and world-making. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011), When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (April 2026); co-author with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024); and Series Editor with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis of Vision and Justice, an imprint of Aperture Books. Raiford has written about the work of contemporary artists including Dawoud Bey, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Toyin Ojih Odutola. Most recently, she was named the 2026 Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing by the Gordon Parks Foundation.

Salamishah Tillet is an academic and artistic polyglot whose work spans cultural criticism, public art, and social justice. She is Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributing critic-at-large at the New York Times. She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (2012) and In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (2021). She is completing Nina Simone and the World She Made, forthcoming in 2027. Tillet has led public art initiatives including A Call To Peace and the “Who Will Be My Monument” mural in Newark. In collaboration with photographer Scheherazade Tillet, she will exhibit Outside Looking In, Black Girlhood (2026) at the Gordon Parks Foundation.