Kym Ragusa's The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging (2006) opens not with text but with an image.1 Even before the title page, there is a photograph of the author with her grandmothers, Italian American Gilda on the left and African American Miriam in the center. Descriptions of photographic images recur throughout the memoir, which, as Teresa Fiore (2017) has written, “could be read as a narrated family photo album” (59). Given that Ragusa is a documentary filmmaker whose works include the short films Demarcations (1991), Blood of my Blood (1995), Passing (1996), and fuori/outside (1997), it is not all that surprising that her writing is relentlessly visual.2 However, the specific role of photography in her memoir has yet to be explored in depth. In this article, I will consider the key role that photographic images play in Ragusa's engaging text and...
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