Abstract
<jats:p>Since the onset of the covid pandemic in March 2020 and the racial reckoning of summer 2020, what is “belonging” in a system bent on killing the least regarded of 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? Chapter 4 turns to the photographic (plus) projects of two contemporary artists, Dawoud Bey and Sadie Barnette, who deploy photography to engage a set of questions about Black life, belonging, and photography itself. Dawoud Bey’s 2018 landscape photography series, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, upends photography’s indexicality by embracing the limits of sight. Sadie Barnette’s installation Family Tree (2021) explodes the notion of the family photograph and asks us to expand our notion of to whom, to what, to which time, and to which realm we belong.</jats:p>