Artist Statement

Photography as a way of seeing, reading, listening

Photography, for me, is an act of attention.

Through it, I move through questions of history and identity in the Caribbean—not to explain them, but to stay with what they feel like in the present. The past is always speaking, but not in ways that are direct or easily understood. The photograph becomes a way of listening.

What is that past? It doesn’t arrive as a single story. It appears in fragments—in objects, in surfaces, in gestures, in the small and often overlooked details of everyday life. These are not illustrations of history, but traces of it. They hold something that cannot be fully said.

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.

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. The images do not seek to summarize or define. They accumulate slowly, allowing something more complex to emerge—something partial, shifting, and unresolved.

Photography, then, is not a way of knowing in a fixed sense. It is a way of remaining with what is not fully known. Of paying attention to what is there, without forcing it into clarity too quickly.

To photograph is to spend time with what resists explanation. To look closely. To notice. To allow meaning to form, if it does, through the act of seeing itself.