Passports

Passports is Keisha Scarville's first major monograph, anchored on more than three hundred reinterpretations the artist has made of her father's passport photograph. Working over the original picture with paint, beads, gold leaf, glitter, and fragments of other Black bodies, Scarville turns a state-issued document of identification into a serial portrait practice — at once a private memorial and a public meditation on how citizenship, personhood, and Black diaspora are inscribed in and resisted by the bureaucratic image. The reworked passports are interleaved with archival photographs from her father's life in Guyana and New York between the 1960s and 1980s, his self-portraits, Scarville's own landscape photography, and transcripts of conversations with him before and after his death. A new essay by Tina M. Campt — Professor of Humanities at Princeton and a leading voice on the visual culture of Black diaspora — situates the project alongside Campt's own thinking on listening to images and the quiet frequencies of Black archives. Published by MACK in May 2026 in a 280-page debossed Swiss hardcover, the volume is at once a daughter's elegy and a sustained argument that the archive is something we make, not something we receive.