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Regina Boone and her miniature schnauzer, Jake. The silhouette is of Boone when she was a young girl.
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Collected works by artists from Detroit, Richmond and around the world continually inspire Boone.
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Photographs of Boone’s father, grandfather and extended family members have a place of honor in her living room.
Regina Boone, an award-winning staff photojournalist with the Richmond Free Press, finds inspiration in other people’s stories. Ironically, she seems unaware that her own story inspires others.
After graduating from Spelman College, the nation’s oldest historically black college for women, Boone could have joined the family business. Her late father, Raymond H. Boone, was the founder and editor of the Richmond Free Press, which he and her mother, Jean Patterson Boone, started publishing in 1992, the same year Regina graduated.
Instead, Boone joined the JET Program USA and spent three years teaching English in Japan. When it was time to come home, she took the scenic route, backpacking around the world, solo, through India, South Africa, Kenya and many other nations. “I was honing my eye as a photographer, not being influenced by anyone else’s eye or schedule,” she says. “I didn’t call myself a tourist — I immersed myself.”
Given Boone’s background as a world traveler, one might be surprised to learn it’s the simple things that most inspire her. “I’m inspired by all the people I meet on a daily basis, by my travels and by stories,” she says. “Circumstances. Challenges. Triumphs.”
Before her father died from cancer in 2014, he revealed some little-known details of family history. His father, Tsuruju Miyazaki, a Japanese immigrant, was arrested at his rural Suffolk, Virginia, restaurant just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and shipped to the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, never to return to his two young sons and the love of his life, his Black partner, Lethia "Leather" Boone. In 2017, Regina Boone embarked on an amazing journey that took her back to Japan, where she met her late father’s first cousins and discovered that her grandfather’s ashes were interred in the family mausoleum.
Today, Boone’s living room houses a miniature shrine commemorating this and other legacies. On the wall, photos of her father and grandfather, and a group portrait from Miyazaki’s sister’s wedding are among the few mementos her father had been able to salvage from his family's difficult past. There are also portraits of Regina and her mother as young girls.
Beneath the portraits sits a table — a small altar of sorts — holding incense, a small wooden figure carved by a survivor of the Rohwer Relocation Center and a model of a 1934 Ford Coupe (the kind of car her grandfather drove), sent by a secret admirer.
Her own life mission involves creating art that addresses intergenerational pain and trauma. While she worked as a photojournalist with the Detroit Free Press, Boone’s photo of 2-year-old Sincere Smith gave a face to the Flint water crisis, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in January 2016. Boone continues to document important news events. “I had and still have a responsibility in my role as a truth seeker.”
