Purchase Keisha Scarville's fine print from 2023 and receive a free copy of her signed contact sheet from her 2018 exhibition at Light Work, Alma. Please note the frame is not included.
Contact Sheet
Contact Sheet 199: Keisha Scarville
Publisher: Light Work (September 2018)
Keisha Scarville’s primary theme is the relationship between transformation and the unknown. Grounded in photography, she works across media to explore place, absence, and subjectivity. After the death of her mother in 2015, Scarville deepened her use of photography as a way to explore how the loss of such an anchor point can affect one’s identity and sense of both absence and self in the world. Scarville’s new exhibition, titled Alma, presents a selection of photographs whose larger subject is transformation born of loss.
She has worked on this project for more than three years and has approached it in several different ways that she describes as “chapters.” Initially the work was about body as medium and then, place-as-container, particularly Guyana, South America, Alma’s birthplace, and Crown Heights, Brooklyn, an enclave of Caribbean immigrants where Scarville grew up, which she continues to call home. Working with Alma’s richly patterned clothing and possessions, Scarville says she looks for ways to visually conjure her mother’s presence. “I am interested in how the absent body lives in the photograph and the materiality of absence. I am seeking invocation, something celebratory that rethinks absence as a threshold.”
Fine Print
lick of finger #21, 2023
Archival inkjet print, 11x13.75" image on 13x15.75" paper
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
This image was made specifically for my book, lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound, where I explore how notions of belonging and identity are formed and structured. In the book, I interweave my images with archival imagery, passages from books, personal texts, and film stills to engage new genealogies and disrupt conventional, linear histories.
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Keisha Scarville (b. Brooklyn, NY; lives Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies, and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the International Center of Photography, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem; Huxley–Parlour, London; ICA Philadelphia; Contact Gallery, Toronto; Light Work, Syracuse; Brooklyn Museum; Higher Pictures, Brooklyn; and Webber Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include the 2nd Bienal das Amazônias, Belém, Brazil (2025, curated by Manuela Moscoso); Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025; The Rose, Lumber Room, Portland, Oregon (2023, curated by Justine Kurland); If I Had a Hammer, FotoFest Biennial 2022, Houston, Texas; and All of Them Witches, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2020, curated by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons). Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, George Eastman House, Denver Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts. She has participated in residencies at Light Work, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, WOPHA, Baxter St at CCNY, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. In addition, her work has appeared in Vice, Small Axe, and The New York Times. She was a recipient of the 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund and awarded the inaugural Saltzman Prize in 2024. She is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her first book, lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound, was published by MACK and shortlisted in the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook Awards. Her second book with MACK is scheduled to be published in spring 2026.