Leigh Raiford
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Spring 2024

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is Co-Director and Co-Principal Investigator (with Tianna S. Paschel) of the Black Studies Collaboratory, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Raiford received her BA from Wesleyan University and PhD from Yale University. She is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (North Carolina, 2011), a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize. She is co-author (with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler) of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (Thames and Hudson, 2024). She is co-editor (with Heike Raphael-Hernandez) of Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora (Washington, 2017), and (with Renee Romano) of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Georgia, 2006). Raiford’s work has appeared in academic journals, including American Quarterly, Art Journal, Small Axe, History and Theory, and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, as well as in Artforum, Aperture, Ms. Magazine, and online for The Atlantic and Al-Jazeera. Raiford’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, Volkswagen Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Hellman Family Foundation.

Project Description

When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World

In her Academy project, When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World, (under contract with Duke), Raiford focuses on photographs made by a handful of Black American activists and artists who traveled the world for study, work, or movement building—sometimes for pleasure and sometimes because their lives or those of their loved ones depended on it. Raiford considers the specifics of everyday image-making practices and the ways in which they were often committed to improving the conditions of Black lives globally. In Berlin, she will work with images of the Black feminist poet Audre Lorde made by Dagmar Schultz and housed at the Freie Universität’s JFK Institute for North American Studies. Raiford also plans to refine the theoretical concept she calls “Black habits of photography,” to attend to the ways Black artists, activists, and amateur photographers have engaged the medium as a mode of emplacing themselves in an anti-Black world and how the choice to use photography is itself a way both to mediate one’s relationship to the world and to reimagine how it might be different.

Academy Activities

14 Mar 24
Black Habits of Photography Black Studies

Anna-Maria Kellen Lecture

Black Habits of Photography

How have Black artists, activists, and everyday practitioners used photography to situate themselves in a world of anti-Blackness?

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27 Mar 24
When Home is a Photograph: Kathleen Cleaver’s Albums of Exile Black Studies

American Academy Fellow at ICI

When Home is a Photograph: Kathleen Cleaver’s Albums of Exile

How Kathleen Cleaver has used photography to make a "home" in the world

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14 Mar 24

Black Habits of Photography

How have Black artists, activists, and everyday practitioners used photography to situate themselves in a world structured by anti-Blackness? Such efforts are not simply about creating a comforting self-image that contrasts to the violent colonial uses of photography; they are also about examining t ...

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22 Feb 24

Fellow Spotlight: Leigh Raiford

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In her Academy project, “When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World,” Raiford focuses on photographs made by a handful of Black American activists and artists who travel ...

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