322 Ways of Looking at a Father: in an ongoing series, the artist experiments with embellishment and transmutation of a passport photo.

At this time in the United States, the Trump regime is aggressively and narrowly redefining notions of nationhood and citizenship. The government is using the Alien Enemies Act, previously invoked specifically in wartime, to deport anyone labeled as a threat to America, without due process, without respect for freedom of speech. Many of us on the left, including writers and artists, are living in shock and in fear of an administration that violates visas and green cards, documents that secure passage, standing, and legality in a foreign country. We are witnessing daily a kind of targeting, violence, and xenophobia that has only ever led to the grimmest of outcomes in world history. In this context, photographer and artist Keisha Scarville’s Passports 2012–2025, at Higher Pictures in Dumbo, couldn’t be more salient. The exhibition consists of 322 images, digital reproductions of a passport photo of the artist’s father, taken at the age of sixteen, that he had gifted to his daughter.

Scarville’s father migrated from Guyana to the United States in the late 1960s. The series began in 2012 and was prompted by a conversation the photographer had with him. She asked if he would ever consider returning to Guyana. He answered, “No, I’m an American now.” What ensues, then, with the artist’s ongoing practice, is a process of transformation based on the passport photo. It is an interrogation of what it has meant for her father to leave his country of origin and to become someone essentially viewed as a Black American. The collection explores her father’s identity, his travels, his transformation, transmutation, assimilation, and the many possibilities exhibited by various personas. With collage, painting, assemblage, and possibly sculpture, and materials like gold paint, glitter, beads, puzzle pieces, found images, and thread, Scarville embellishes her father’s image. It is the kind of shape-shifting associated with aliens or entities in science fiction, or with deities that occupy the spirit realm, gesturing toward Afrofuturism.

The work calls to mind the medical textbook collages of Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson’s collages of Black femme and male images from vintage Ebony and Jet magazines, and the Calling Card series of Adrian Piper, to name a few. I am reminded, too, of the West African Orishas, who in some stories are said to have traveled with the slaves on ships to the new world. They act as guides, protectors, teachers, agitators, and here can offer justice and solace. They can also be mischief-makers. There is quite a bit of mischief and play in Scarville’s hand, as well. Her father is at times a superhero with bat ears and at other times a saint. He wears an Afro, dons masks and disguises; he is a man, a boy, a woman, with images from pop culture and African American histories embedded into and around his face. Scarville has said she wanted to trouble the neutralized passport picture and offer a series of interventions to the static, dispassionate image.