Passports by Keisha Scarville | MACK, May 2026

Passport photos are tools — keys to crossing borders, but also governmental weapons of surveillance and classification. Photographer Keisha Scarville makes something else of them in Passports, reworking a single such image of her father, Keith Revanol Scarville, a Guyanese immigrant to New York City, hundreds of times. She paints, draws, and collages glitter, beads, bits of hair, and other images onto his passport photo — taken in the mid-1960s, when he was only 16 years old — sowing a thicket of personal history on the surface of what otherwise might be a dehumanizing, bureaucratic object. The book, like these transformations, is densely, hauntingly beautiful, interspersed with archival images and conversations between the artist and her father, plus a moving essay by scholar Tina M. Campt. “Guyana didn’t have anything more for me,” Keith Scarville tells his daughter. “I’ve been in this country for almost fifty-eight years … it’s changed me.” —Julia Curl