‘Black Archives’: A Collective Family Photo Album

Our lives are often measured by the things we keep. Renata Cherlise, visual artist and founder of the popular multimedia platform Black Archives, refers to herself as “a keeper of stories.” “I’m the person within my family that is this designated gatherer of stories,” she tells me. “I collect them, hold on to them, and preserve them.” The archivist’s late grandmother and father were both amateur photographers who instilled in her a love of the medium and left behind a treasure trove of family memories in the form of Polaroids and a meticulously curated family photo album — which serves as the inspiration for her first book project, Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life.

Cherlise always knew she wanted to engage with archival materials in the photo realm, but her work with Black Archives, which she founded in 2015, allows her to document stories “on a broader scale” than she could have imagined. The platform has since amassed a large following across Instagram and Twitter, and is now in a long-term Getty Images partnership that involves curating and exhibiting photographs of everyday Black life from its historic collection. The Black Archives book — out this month — is the embodiment of one of the core ideals of the platform: honoring the Black past by making it accessible. Between 2019 and 2021, Cherlise opened up the book to submissions from the public on more than one occasion. She received hundreds of family photos. These were images of strangers, but she felt a kinship in viewing their similar archival practices as families, and recognized their visual language as kindred with her own. “I felt honored that they wanted to share that with me and create this collective experience,” she says. “If given an opportunity, people love to share stories from their past and from their families.”

She began to group and sort the images into themes such as “Style,” “Holding Joy, Love, and Tenderness,” and “The Front Porch.” There’s even a section dedicated to nonphotographic ephemera, such as funeral programs. “What all of these photographs collectively represented to me was similar to home,” she says. “That became the framework for the photo album: These photographs remind me of home. How can I present them in a way that makes you feel at home?”

There are, Cherlise points out in the book, more photographs available of Black people laboring than at rest. This observation inspired a section on Black leisure, in which you can see a young Black woman playing horseshoes in a field circa 1945, and a family playing in the water on the “colored side” of Buckroe Beach in Hampton, Virginia, in 1960. For Cherlise, whose archival work is both research- and community-based, holding on to Black memories is ancestral, collaborative, and vital. “I keep everything, and I’m a digital hoarder too. If there’s a family event, I’m the person taking all of the photographs. I’m behind the camera, and I collect, like, Airdrop me your photos, whatever you have, send them to me,” she says. “I’m sure that as I get older, my process will evolve.”

“I try to be really intentional — and I think we all have to be — about the way that we approach history and its relationship to time and space and where we are,” Cherlise says. “It’s easy to forget, especially in the present day. We consume so much and I feel like we have to fight to remember, fight to hold onto those stories from the past. We can lean on them or lean into them as they help inform our present and inspire our future.”