An Artist Finds a Muse in Her Father’s Teenage Passport Photo

The Brooklyn-based artist Keisha Scarville was in her 20s when her father handed over a stack of photographs, including his first passport portrait as a teenager in Guyana. “I’ve become the de facto archivist for my family,” says Scarville, who for years kept the black-and-white photo in a frame on her dresser. In 2012, she decided to make copies, beginning what has evolved into a monumental project on a palm-size scale. She’s created hundreds of variations on the image, incorporating collage, handwritten text, pools of glitter and even a wishbone. An ostensibly banal form of documentation has proved to be “this really explosive platform to have so many conversations,” says the artist. A cutout of James Brown, whose 1968 song “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” debuted the summer after her father immigrated to the United States, reflects his longtime love of music as well as the shift in racial consciousness at the time. In another portrait, a flash of overlaid red lipstick connects him to the daughter who shares his likeness. After a New York exhibition last year presented some 300 of the works on the gallery walls, the book “Passports,” out this week from Mack, offers additional context for the series. Scarville has included larger-format collages (one layers her photograph of the Guyanese landscape with her father’s 1980s self-portrait) and excerpts from their dialogue. “I liked everything about America, but I didn’t know a lot,” he says of his first impressions — in part because the books and magazines back home only focused on glamorous lives. “They didn’t tell us about the average person.”

— Laura Regensdorf