When Home is a Photograph

Blackness and Belonging in the World

Duke University Press, 2026

How do Black people use photography to make home in the world? Focusing on activists and artists including Marcus Garvey, James Van Der Zee, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Raiford explores the everyday image-making practices that Black Americans employed to improve the condition of Black lives globally by imagining, identifying, inhabiting, leaving, defending, and destroying “home.”

“It is impossible to read Leigh Raiford’s tour de force and ever think of world-making without the image ever again. When Home Is a Photograph is not just a masterpiece for the history of photography, black studies, and the humanities, it is a landmark necessary to understand the extraordinary act now seen as an everyday encounter—how photography allows us to craft a home in the world.”

— Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Harvard University

“A major contribution to visual studies focusing on concepts of reimagining home as it explores how Black people throughout the diaspora used photography to make ‘home’ despite displacement and migration.”

— Deborah Willis, New York University