Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life

A photographic celebration and exploration of Black identity and experience through the twentieth century from the founder and curator of the hit multimedia platform Black Archives.

＂Browsing the book ultimately feels like looking through one immense family photo album. And that’s intentional.＂--Essence

Renata Cherlise’s family loved capturing their lives in photographs and home movies, sparking her love of archival photography. Following in her family’s footsteps, Cherlise established Black Archives, which presents a nuanced representation of Black people across time living vibrant, ordinary lives. Through the platform, many have discovered and shared images of themselves and their loved ones experiencing daily life, forming multidimensional portraits of people, places, and the Black community. These photographs not only tell captivating stories, they hold space for collective memory and kinship.

Black Archives is a stunning collection of timeless images that tell powerful, joyful stories of everyday life and shed light on Black culture’s dynamic, enduring influence through the generations. The images showcase reunions, nights out on the town, parents and children, church and school functions, holidays, big life events, family vacations, moments at home, and many more occasions of leisure, excitement, reflection, and pride.

Featuring more than three hundred images that spotlight the iconic and the candid, Black Archives offers a nuanced compendium of Black memory and imagination.

Renata Cherlise is a multidisciplinary, research-based visual artist who uses various mediums to explore themes of identity, family, and culture. Cherlise’s work seamlessly bridges her Southern upbringing with contemporary methodologies in digital and physical spaces while reimagining notions of the Black experience. Her archival project, Black Archives, has evolved from a photo-based website of visual narratives into a collaborative platform featuring archival histories and modern-day stories from across the African diaspora.