Artist Statement

Photography as a way of seeing, reading, listening

Photography is, for me, an act of discovery.

Through photography, I engage and investigate questions of history and identity in the Caribbean.

Through my camera, I “read” history, and write it too.

The past is always speaking. The gesture of the photograph is a means of listening. What is that past? This is a question that never leaves me.

To understand where we are now, it feels more urgent than ever that we take time to deepen our commitment to deciphering the complexities that have shaped, and are continually shaping, who we are.

The question of memory looms very large in my mind. Where and how do we record our memory? How do we retrieve our memory? What do we do with our memory when we have unearthed it?

One of the understandings I have arrived at through photography is that memory is recorded in how our bodies move, in the smallest gestures of everyday life. We have centuries of memory stored inside of us here in the Caribbean. This memory is embedded in how we speak, how we cook, how we dance, how we sing, how a hand falls on any one of our many instruments of music, how we play mas…

When I photograph traditions in Carnival and other festivals, what I see are the beautiful, powerful, embodied ways we have developed over the last 500 years of expressing ourselves — of guarding memory. The photograph enters into conversation with memory, listening for what it has to say to us today. What the photograph sees is often multi-layered, and can take time to reveal itself.

While history is to be found in books, it is also very much to be found in our rituals and traditions, and through the seemingly simple daily acts of living. Photography has given me a way to both read and see history in the frame, a history that reveals itself through observation, participation — for the camera is both observer and participant. Photography becomes not only witness, but active agent.

Photography then gives me a way to navigate the weight of history in the Caribbean. Racism, dehumanisation, violence, insatiable greed, cultural arrogance, sexism are all deeply embedded in the foundations of our societies across the Americas. So much presses us to forget that past, to erase its truths from our consciousness. Photography helps me to see the past is very present, stitched into the fabric of who we are, hidden in plain sight at almost every turn.

My photography practice does not find expression in isolation. The ways in which I see our beauty and our pain are continually impacted by the work of mas makers, poets, historians, writers, musicians, dancers, playwrights, actors, performance artists, visual artists and — increasingly — by attentiveness to the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary rhythms and movements of daily living.