To Collect & Collate: The Keepers of Black Photography

To Collect & Collate: The Keepers of Black Photography is an inaugural three-day symposium taking place in Accra, Ghana (March 10–12, 2026), bringing together artists, archivists, collectors, scholars, curators, and cultural workers working with Black photographic archives and collections across Africa and the diaspora. Through conversations and presentations, the symposium centers the urgent work of preservation and access, while also rethinking what archives can be and who they serve.

Co-organized by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, documentary photographer and professor of photography at Rutgers University–Newark, and Dr. Emilie Boone, professor of art history at New York University, and hosted at NYU Accra, the symposium foregrounds the knowledge, labor, and long-term commitment that make Black photographic memory accessible across generations.

At a moment when questions of custody, access, digitization, and interpretation are reshaping how photographic histories circulate, To Collect & Collate offers a rare space for practitioners to share tools, strategies, and hard-won lessons. The program focuses on the real work behind preservation and access, including ethics in archival practices, cataloging, digitization, collecting practices, caring for vernacular
photographs and public-facing storytelling. It also invites participants to rethink the archive itself, what an archive can be, who it is for, how it is shaped, and how photographic memory can be held and shared in ways that are both rigorous and expansive. In doing so, the symposium centers the stewards of the archive and the evolving practices that sustain it.

Some of the speakers include:
Dr. Leigh Raiford, author and Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of California, Berkeley, and the 2026 Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing with The Gordon Parks Foundation.
Dr. Kenneth Montague, Founder and Director, Wedge Curatorial Projects; collector behind The Wedge Collection (Toronto).
Paul Ninson, Founder and Executive Director, Dikan Center, Awo Institute, which focuses on preserving, digitizing, and archiving African history and culture (Accra, Ghana).
Amy Sall, cultural advisor and author of The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema and Power (Thames & Hudson).
Full List of Participants can be found here

keepersofblackphoto.org