Keisha Scarville: Passports

Passports 2012-2025 presents an intimate body of work by Keisha Scarville taken from an ongoing series centred around her father's earliest passport photograph. The artist has reinterpreted the photograph over three hundred times to date, each iteration reworked and collaged with varying materials and found imagery, paints, beads, photograph fragments of Black bodies, gold leaf, glitter to form a deeply textured act of photomontage. Interwoven with the passport works are archival images taken between the 1960s and 1980s in Guyana and New York City, where her father settled in the US, his selfportraits, Scarville's own photographs of him and of Guyana's striking landscape, and short transcripts of their conversations. Together these works excavate untold histories and disrupt the false neutrality of the passport image in an interrogation of citizenship and personhood, absence and materiality. 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.

Published by Mack
2026
Hardcover
5.90 x 8.50
208 pages