"When Home is a Photograph considers how Black Americans use photography to make home in the world. Exploring the complex relationship between racialized subjects and the medium of photography, Leigh Raiford focuses primarily on well-known twentieth-century Black American activists and artists including James Van Der Zee, Marcus Garvey, Eslanda Goode Robinson, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver, examining how different genres of photography emplace the individual within a known and imagined history and sociopolitical perspective. Featuring modes from portraiture and ethnographic photography, to family snapshots and landscape imagery, Raiford asks how a sense of self is formed around, enacted on, and mediated by the lens of a camera. Recognizing photography not only as a way of knowing the self and documenting space and time, but also as a site of violence and mechanism for codifying imperialism and racial sight, this book envisions the work of decolonizing the camera, centering Black photographic habits to better understand the conceptual implications of home"-- Provided by publisher.