LEIGH RAIFORD: Rethinking the History of Photography

As an Anna-Maria Kellen fellow at The American Academy in Berlin, Raiford has spent the spring in a residency at Wannsee working on their current book project, When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World, and further developping their concept around Black habits of photography. In a lecture of the same name, she presented initial drafts of the theorem, spoke about the power of self-portraits, and gave an insight into how Black social movements in the United States have utilised photography. Special focus is given to figures such as Kathleen Cleaver, with whom she collaborated in archiving private photographs and albums. 

SLEEK met Raiford to learn more about the world-proposing potentials of photography, the decolonisation of the gaze, and the camera as a pedagogical tool.

SLEEK Leigh, you are currently developing a concept surrounding Black habits of photography. What does this entail?

LEIGH RAIFORD I have always been interested in the relationship between visual media, film, and photography. I want to explore their capacity to represent and imagine the world, and the languages they give us to express what we’re seeing and to make sense of the world around us. I was born at the end of the civil rights and Black power movements. I understood that all my life choices had been made possible by those movements and realised that photography becomes the ‘rough draft of history’. 

Many of the conversations around photography and marginalised peoples posit photography as a site of violence and the camera as a tool of oppression in colonial efforts to dispossess and dehumanise people. At the same time, I recognise that marginalised people use photography outside of those practices of oppression to imagine other modes of being in the world and to learn about themselves. 

If we think about the ways we take self-portraits, I see that as a way of learning ourselves in the world, trying to figure out how we appear to others and ourselves. I’ve started giving a name to what these other practices of photography are. I’m not the first person who’s thinking about modes of photography outside of a European, Western, and colonial framework, but I wanted to think specifically about the kinds of everyday practices I see and what portals might open up to rethink the history of photography itself. 

S Could you tell us more about photography as a tool for learning yourself, or, as you said in your lecture, a pedagogical tool?

LR I started thinking about it during the research for my first book on social movements and photography. I was really interested in how people access or mediate the world through the camera. History helped me think about how everyday people are using our cameras to access the world. Right now, we use photography to make sense of what we’re seeing or not seeing, to ask questions, and to explore. Think of all the failed digital photographs we make just to say, let me try it again and again and again. I think that repetition and practice are ways of understanding the camera as a pedagogical tool.

S Archives and photographs historically are tools that produce knowledge; they are inscribed with power dynamics, but they can also make subversive counternarratives visible. What role do photographs and albums play in decolonising the gaze, the camera, the archive, and thus knowledge production?

LR There are several aspects to that question. I always go back to Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s book, Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History, in which he says that silence in archives happens at multiple stages. It’s not simply a scenario in which people are excluded or silenced from these repositories of history; it happens at the moment of archive creation, storytelling, and usage. I recognise archives as colonial inventions, repositories of power, and all of the awful things that archives can be, but I also want to recognise that power gets inscribed at various stages. That means there are multiple opportunities for intervention and to ‘read against the grain’, as Marisa Fuentes or Saidiya Hartman have offered. Archival material holds so many possibilities, which are patiently waiting for a new pair of eyes and new modes of narrative construction with the potential to illuminate a different kind of history. 

Things like the photo album as a domestic, often feminised creative form don’t necessarily find their way into archives, or if they do, they are not taken seriously. Part of decolonising the gaze or archives is not just about inclusion. It’s not just saying Black women were there too; it’s about changing how we’ve been disciplined to see the worldOne way to do that is to pay attention to everyday practices and quotidian engagements with the world that represent other ways of living under systems of oppression.

S In your lecture, you spoke about ‘archives of possibilities’, a term borrowed from Marianne Hirsch. What are the visions of the future, the world-proposing potential that lies within Black habits of photography?

LR I just finished a project called Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, which rethinks the history of photography through the lens of collaboration. A photograph is always a dialogue between at least two people; photography is itself a social connection, and it activates social connections. The utopian possibilities of photography are about how it can bring people into greater solidarity, how it activates more just futures in a very real political sense, but also how it can activate our imagination in creative spaces. People being able to photograph themselves and each other as they want to be seen is equally meaningful. Returning to physical photographs as part of everyday practice, touching images and manipulating them, exchanging them, and giving them away can all be part of finding solidarity or entering into collaboration with one another; collaboration is essential for our survival.

S Earlier, you used the phrase ‘make a photograph’ – why is that?

LR I’m indebted to the scholar, filmmaker, and activist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, with whom I worked on this book. Ariella helps us decolonise our language around photography. She proposes that photography didn’t begin in the 1830s but in 1492 with Columbus’ arrival in the western hemisphere as an imperial project. In this sense, photography becomes a tool in their plan to extract resources and consume the world. Much of the language we have around photography is about extraction, violence, colonisation, and war. We ‘take’ a picture, and we ‘shoot’ film. The term ‘snapshot’ is derived from hunting. How do we find new words to describe what Ariella calls the event of photography? How do we distance ourselves from photography as a tool of imperialism and move towards world building and solidarity?

S World building also plays a part in your book When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World. What does home mean for you in this sense?

LR I originally started thinking about how photography can produce, join up, and express notions of the African diaspora, as well as how differently positioned Black peoples across the world find connection but also misrecognise one another. As I was working with different archives, looking specifically at a group of Black Americans who were travelling all over the world, I realised how they were making photographs and how the photograph itself is a kind of home. 

Home is not always a safe place for people. If we imagine home in its most utopian sense, it is a place where we can be our best selves, a place of belonging, of love, and of experimentation. I was interested in the idea that a photograph might provide that feeling of home for people for whom home is not always guaranteed. For example, I was thinking a lot about the murder of Breonna Taylor by the police in her own home. I was also reminded of writing during the pandemic, when home became the actual space of protection and safety against this virus, yet so many people are unhoused. I wanted to reimagine the photograph as a mobile home that can travel and be carried – not just as a site of violence but also a source of joy and possibility.

S bell hooks writes in her essay ‘Homeplace: A Site of Resistance’ that home is something that is actively produced through solidary everyday practices specifically performed by Black women. Another example is Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series, or photographs collected and labelled in photo albums. The practice of ‘making home’ as well as creating photo albums is, as you’ve mentioned, stereotypically feminised. What role does intersectionality play in your work?

LR I was trained as a Black feminist; I’m always interested in not just centring Black women but also in dislodging the categories of gender and race that we’ve been handed. Instead, I think about how all of those categories are produced, entrenched, policed, and sometimes undone. Photography is a good place to think about intersectionality because a photograph’s meaning is never fixed; it travels. I understand my work as trying to centre the experiences and lives of Black women, broadly defined, but also Black feminism. This analysis is an invitation to question what seem to be immutable categories, always in the service of building better futures. I would say Black feminism as a methodology also requires thinking about new modes of invention, creativity, discourse, and language that Black women create in order to survive and express themselves in the world.