“Carnival is the great, grand anthem to ourselves that has walked through the ashes of everything.”

Shivanee Ramlochan, In a World of Their Own: Carnival Dreamers and Makers, Photographs by Maria Nunes.

Once I began to photograph Carnival heritage in Trinidad in 2007 there was no turning back. It changed my life. I could feel and see how much of our history was embedded in the movements and sounds of the mas. As someone who taught history for 10 years I realised mas offered a whole new way of “reading” history - the images are whole stories in themselves. I came to understand mas as a living archive of what our ancestors embedded into form, gesture, movement, sound. The camera enters into this dynamic as both observer and participant. The photographic act becomes not only witness, but active agent.

These images are an overview of the expansion of this work beyond Trinidad to Guadeloupe, Grenada, Dominica, Montserrat and Nevis.