Leigh Raiford
A few quotes from the introduction of her 2026 book When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World.
Photography as a practice never performs a single function and in a sense is not bound to a single ontology.
And photography offers a series of choices about where we choose to focus our gaze, where we choose to linger, to stop, with what and with whom we choose to sit. It is about attention. Which is to say, photography is also about refusal.
Since March 2020, what is “belonging” in a system set on killing us, and what is “home” in a world literally on fire? If photography is an apparatus for world-making, what can it actually achieve in the face of disinformation, deepfakes, and unfolding and ongoing catastrophe?