Passports Book Launch with Keisha Scarville and Nigel Westmaas
Thursday 18th June, 19:00
Join us on Thursday, June 18 at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Keisha Scarville’s new book Passports, an intimate collection of work centered around an early passport photograph of the artist’s father.
In the book, Scarville reinterprets the photograph, each iteration reworked and collaged with varying materials and found imagery—paint, beads, photographic fragments of Black bodies, glitter—to form a deeply textured act of photomontage. The book also includes archival images taken between the 1960s and 80s in Guyana and New York City, Scarville’s own photographs of her father as well as his self-portraits and transcripts of their conversations. 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.
In the book, Scarville reinterprets the photograph, each iteration reworked and collaged with varying materials and found imagery—paint, beads, photographic fragments of Black bodies, glitter—to form a deeply textured act of photomontage. The book also includes archival images taken between the 1960s and 80s in Guyana and New York City, Scarville’s own photographs of her father as well as his self-portraits and transcripts of their conversations. 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.
For the launch, Scarville will be joined in conversation by Nigel Westmaas, Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College.