Created to serve as a tribute to the power of the Black family photo album, Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life by Renata Cherlise is a vivid celebration of the informal snapshot and the power of those images to connect and inspire generations across time. The book is out now from Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Cherlise is the founder of Black Archives, an online multimedia platform first launched on Tumblr to share her family’s photo albums and images that have mesmerized her since her childhood in Jacksonville, Fla. Indeed, the book collection is inspired by her father, an amateur photographer and the family historian, and by her maternal grandmother, who left behind a trove of carefully labeled polaroid snapshots capturing precious family memories and events. Now on Instagram, the Black Archives has become a popular multimedia platform for collaborations with individuals and institutions alike.

The new book goes far beyond the Cherlise family. It collects photographs made between the 1930s and the 1990s, echoing the platform’s origins and sharing photos of everyday Black life inside and outside the home that depict the histories of family and community. PW talked with Cherlise about the journey from platform to book.

Publishers Weekly: What inspired you to create the Black Archives platform?

Renata Cherlise: Digging in library and institutional archives, I was captivated by photos––images I’d never seen in mainstream media or textbooks––documenting the Black experience. In 2011, I started posting them on the blogging platform Tumblr. My thought was, I don't have a repository, an archive, or images to license, but I can dig and dive and delve into archives, and curate them into photo essays. I wanted it to be useful, so crediting the archives and making sure everything is cited was important. Then, I noticed through the analytics that we were getting traffic from a lot of universities, and my peers were sharing it across Twitter. In 2015, I launched the Black Archives website and Instagram account, and in 2019 I left my corporate job as a technical writer in the banking industry to give full time to Black Archives.

How did the book deal come about?

When I launched the platform, writing a book was in the back of my mind, initially as an independent project. When I started researching Black publishers and Black editors, someone recommended Nicole Counts at One World. There was a conversation with One World and Ten Speed, and I ended up going with them. So it started off as an independent project that transformed into this deal.

How did you source the archival photos in the book?

Many of the photographs are from our community on Instagram; I put out calls for photos at the end of 2019, in early 2020, and in early 2021–so this was during the pandemic. The way we share the images on our Instagram account, we’re not really editorializing it; the photographs say what they need to say on their own. But with this book, I thought it would be appropriate to include my family photos to show how the lineage connects throughout the diaspora. Also, we sourced from other institutions and repositories.

You’re not a trained librarian or archivist; how did you acquire the skills to build the archive?

Having an interest, drive, and passion for archives, years ago I applied for positions working with institutions–but no one would take a chance on me. Then I thought about how our grandmothers and great grandmothers were able to preserve and pass stories down through the generations without a formal education in archives or library science. And I just took that route.

The Black Archives platform also collaborates with corporate partners on a variety of projects. How did that come about?

Beginning in 2017, filmmakers and directors began reaching out through the Instagram account, seeking archival material to display at music venues, or to incorporate within their documentaries, and it just expanded! We signed with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), who represents us on brand deals and partnerships with clients like Getty Images or the NBA. A couple of years ago, Sony Music reached out and said, we're working on this music video for Whitney Houston, and can you help us? My role was to source archival footage to be in “The Greatest Love of All” music video. Most production companies have a budget allocated for licensing. We'll utilize that budget, and we're paid a fee for curating or amplifying across our social channels. Sometimes we'll take on the role of archival producer: once I select the imagery and it's approved, I'll help liaise or facilitate that agreement between the archive and the client.

Did you know that “archival producer” was a thing?

I had no idea––this was definitely on-the-job training! I thought, people actually do this? Now, I know how to navigate the space. Had I known about this when I was younger, I would have definitely said this is what I want to do!

What are some of the companies that you collaborate with?

Our first big collaboration was in 2021: for six months, we partnered with Adobe for a series called The Living Archive. We reached out to photographers and curators who were incorporating archives in their work, and highlighted one every month. Those selected received a stipend and a year’s subscription of Adobe products. For the last three years, we've partnered with LinkNYC digital kiosks for Black History Month. We put out a call for family photos, and curated them to be on display in the LinkNYC kiosks throughout February. Words can't express how happy I am when I see people seeing and tagging themselves!

And through our relationship with CAA, we have access to the Getty Images collections, to share and highlight the Black experience across our platforms. In 2021, I was part of a judging panel for Getty’s HBCU digitization grant, to select which HBCUs [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] would be awarded a grant to help digitize their photo archives. That was really exciting.

What other projects are coming up?

We're always working on projects through the service side. We're under a lot of NDAs on that, but otherwise we're looking to move into motion pictures this year; we're hoping to release a short documentary (our first) that we will have producing credits on. We really want to expound on the storytelling because these are more than just images that live on social media. They're great stories to be imagined, and to be told, and we really want to move in that direction.