In the thick of Winter 2010, I began my photographic exploration of the historic district of Sugar Hill. I shot images on the streets, in residents’ homes and in the humming, low-ceilinged jazz club, St. Nick’s Pub. During my time at school, I can recall having received advice from an instructor to visit the home of a resident who entertained the public with live jazz on the weekends. It was advice that remained unheeded until well after graduation.

Several months later, I had a fortuitous meeting with the highly accomplished photographer, Chester Higgins Jr., who promptly introduced me to yet more of Harlem’s magic, including the welcoming home and beautiful music of Marjorie Eliot and her jazz band. I was hooked, and visited whenever I could, bringing along any adventurous guests who may have stumbled into my Harlem home.

In 2011, I was approached to produce a postcard that reflected something idiosyncratic about Harlem. It was easy to be led back to Marjorie’s at-home, jazz sessions. I made many a grainy image – featuring the different performers and the appreciative audience, in the fading window light, and the cyan glow of the ceiling lights in Marjorie’s living-room-turned-concert-hall. At times Marjorie herself would be moved by the music or perhaps a memory, and a tear might escape an eye and slide down a cheek.

Ms. Eliot put up with me invading her home, even graciously welcomed me, outside of the usual public hours, to create a portrait in my slow, deliberate manner. She had had a grueling year and did not want to relive her pain through yet another interview. She did not mind a few pictures.

Yet it was the image I captured of her, as she played the grand piano, beneath an arch of trees and sky, in the Jackie Robinson Park, that became the postcard.

Just Marjorie and the Piano, her soft, powder blue dress forming a triangle from her shoulders to her knees, her posture upright and her head slightly bent in concentration, her feet in smart red slippers, and the bricks of the bandstand blurred behind her. I called the image “Ebony hands on each ivory key”, in tribute to a favourite poet of mine, Langston Hughes, and in thanks to the lovely Marjorie Eliot.

Freedom Fighter, Kenya, 1920-1957

Freedom Fighter, Trinidad & Tobago, 1941 – 2011

working print of Brother Dedan Kimathi, April 2011, from the series “Black Power’s Inheritance”

The name Dedan Kimathi means one thing to the world and another to me. It is a name that to the general population, conjures up a fearsome warrior, loathed and vilified by the British, celebrated and decorated by the people of an independent Kenya. He was the most recognized of the Mau Mau Freedom Fighters, the group that used military resistance to help bring about the independence of one more African state.

In our own post-independence struggle, for identity and equality, in Trinidad and Tobago, many foot-soldiers adopted names from Africa, for their tangible, literal meaning, or in honour of the leaders and historical figures from a distant motherland, who they most admired .

Brother Dedan Kimathi, of St. James, Trinidad and Tobago renamed himself after the fearless Mau Mau leader. Even before my mind travels to the dreadlocked soldier of East Africa, I see the open smile of Uncle Dedan, who remained uncompromising and committed to a pan-African vision for as long as I knew him. Many people enjoy the rhetoric of ‘revolution’, but few actually live the ideal of giving completely and wholly of themselves, for a cause greater than themselves, in even the most humble ways. Brother Kimathi had such love, loyalty and respect for those with whom he marched, went to prison, and worked with for decades, that to be one of their children, was to be like one of his as well. I cannot thank him enough for being one of those elders in my life who added to my sense of purpose and value in this world.

I was lucky enough to make an image of Uncle Dedan (Black Power’s Inheritance) earlier this year, just a few months before his sudden passing in October. He confronted the camera boldly, with a comfort and confidence that made him stand apart from many of my elder subjects. His anecdotes were rich and amusing. He shared his mementos with me – old prison stationary; collections of newspapers from 1970 and beyond; the primary school reader he kept from his boyhood days, from before Trinidad and Tobago had become an independent nation, featuring Tarzan-like tales and imagery, which he assured me, made him more determined to overturn a system, that instinctively felt wrong to him; a tiny, neatly folded, black and white clip, from a time when opposition to the construction of a massive dam in an African nation was a cause close to his heart.

For my portrait session, he switched out of a yellow t-shirt, and donned, atop his cutoff denim pants, a regal, maroon and gold dashiki. “My sister”, he told me, “you must take my picture like this”.

Much of visual art can be appreciated as shape, form and colour, some of the same basic elements that appeal to our sensory appreciation of nature. Edward Weston referred to nature as ‘the source’. Many artists seek union (communion) with ‘the source’ through their work, using nature as a domain – for reference or habitat.

I began to think about art and nature, after a trip to Pittsburg to view Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater (http://www.fallingwater.org/), and a more recent visit to Storm King Art Center in New Jersey (http://www.stormking.org/)

A placard at the site of Fallingwater proclaims:

Fallingwater embodies American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision for a life in harmony – one that embraces modern technology, the arts, and the environment, and above all celebrates nature’s power to renew the human spirit.

This resonated with me deeply and I felt satisfied that I finally understood the fascination that Fallingwater had held for me for so many years. However, confronted with Storm King Park, an entirely different experience of art-in-nature or rather, art-and-nature, I began to examine my Fallingwater experience more closely.

I viewed Fallingwater on a poetically rainy day. I remember being moved by the rivulets of water sliding down outdoor sculptures, like Rose McClendon (Barthé), her upturned face and clasped hands, a homily to the pouring sky. I was pleasantly surprised to find works by Picasso and Diego Riviera within the house; I can still feel the bite of the cold air, and see the hyper-real colours of every tree-bark, leaf or moss-covered surface, saturated by the rain.

Fallingwater is a work of art that was designed to meld with its environment. The house, so complete in itself, was like its own ecosystem. Like a powerful image or photograph, one is struck by the feeling of a single intention captured in a frame. ‘Everything’ is contained within the structure. A singular theme is echoed in every detail of the house, and this unity, this oneness, can be felt in each moment spent at Fallingwater.

I toured Storm King Art Center on a blue-sky day. I stayed long enough to visit some sections twice and notice how the position of the sun in the sky had moved shadows, and changed contrast on the huge sculptures, giving them new form and feeling as their solidity acquiesced to the mercurial light.

Storm King, for obvious reasons, does not embody a single idea. The park houses many artists’ visions, and has set a variety of pieces into its scenic environment. The eclectic compilation held its own charm, and again compelled me to consider how art drew from, and also found its space in nature.

My current project, Black Power’s Inheritance, fits into the framework of the on-going struggle for self-definition – a grappling with ‘Caribbean Identity’. It is a project about the question of continuity, posed to my peers. What happened after the Uprising of 1970, a pivotal moment in the contemporary history of my nation and region? It has become even more pertinent in light of the 2011 State of Emergency declared by the government of Trinidad and Tobago.

It is a matter of introspection, as well as a search for the pieces of a story that were swept under a carpet of silence, after we looked into a mirror and became shocked by what we saw.

I offer a glimpse into that mirror today, one, and sometimes two or three generations after the fact.

Selections from Black Power’s Inheritance will be on display at Bargehouse,
Oxo Tower Wharf, 
Bargehouse Street, 
South Bank, London SE1 9PH, September 9 – 25, 11am to 6pm at the African and African Caribbean Design Disapora Festival 2011, in the show Forever Forged. Forever Becoming, curated by Holly Bynoe of ARC Magazine.

August 17^th, 2011 marked the 124^th anniversary of the birth of one of Jamaica’s most influential sons, Marcus Mosiah Garvey.

The earliest family portrait in which I am included, shows the Kambons five, arranged around a large drawing of Garvey, set in a handmade frame, intricately carved and painted in the colours of the UNIA flag.

Gallery-hopping on the Upper East Side one day, I encountered a real, silver gelatin print, of a UNIA procession. I could barely believe my luck and my eyes as I got in as close as I could to absorb every detail of the tiny image. The receptionist kindly obliged my enthusiasm, pointing me to the massive book of black and white images by a man named James Van Der Zee, a fortuitous introduction to a photographer of singular importance to my quest to know Harlem. I immediately telephoned my family to inform them that if anyone had $7500 or so to invest, I had found just the thing. Shockingly, no one took me up on my offer.

I would come across more of Van Der Zee’s well-known images of Garvey’s parades much later into my time in New York, at the Studio Museum of Harlem, the official home of the Van Der Zee collection.

It was with great pride that I counted myself amongst those who had come out to remember Garvey on his birthday.

~ AAADT Dancer

In December 2010, I attended one memorable night of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, NYC season.

As someone with a deep appreciation for the visual arts, I was not surprised that the aesthetic appeal of the evening stirred me. Impeccable stage lights, stunning costuming, and aptly selected music, all combined with expertly executed steps to provide an evening of world-class entertainment.

Nothing had prepared me, however, for the feeling I would experience by the end of the night. I can recall half of a year later, the joy that seemed to seep into my pores, and gradually burst into elation before the show was over. As my feet remained grounded, shuffling out of a crowded theater, my entire being felt uplifted, beyond the mundane.

It follows that during the summer of 2011, I could not resist the free, outdoor performance of Ailey’s seminal work, Revelations, by Ailey II, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Undeterred by the untimely showers of rain, I sat amongst the drenched audience, awaiting the show. The creative director, Sylvia Waters, prepped the dripping crowd for what she described as “a celebration of the human experience”.

Hope was spoken to me in the poetic, ineffable language of gesture and sound. The endless striving for the unattainable ‘better tomorrow’ that helps us to endure the challenges of today, was impressed upon my consciousness in a series of fleeting movements and moments that faded into a beautiful residue. The climactic Sinnerman into Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham pushes ‘redemption’ across the threshold of dream and into reality, bringing the audience along to that final, utopian destination.

The language of the old Negro Spirituals is a map, which guides us backwards through time, to the trials of enslavement and the physical and emotional reprieve of music and belief.

“Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? Then why not every man?!”

They appear to me, to be examples, of the very earliest stages of survival through ownership and re-interpretation. A different linguistic construct, another experience, loaned a new weight to the hymns and theology enforced upon Africans on this side of the Atlantic.

Wade in the Water conjures up for me, a vision of Harriet Tubman, guiding her people, time and time again on a perilous, yet necessary journey, in the depths of the night, as surely as if I had been there myself, following voices of cloaked warning. Ailey’s work has provided me with a new visual to relate to this music – the celebratory, open-water baptism that I could witness on a lucky morning, on the shores of my own island.

Open-water baptism off of the coast of Trinidad

The style of worship of the Spiritual Baptists in Trinidad and Tobago, most closely resembles the sentiments captured in the Negro Spirituals and early gospel singing from the USA. The singing often embodies both grief and rapture, capturing the expansiveness of these emotions. To be engulfed in the music of this worship is to feel that surely one could be propelled to heaven on a wave of sorrowful tears.

Ailey himself said that he grew up in the dirt and the sun of the south, and he tells this very specific story, through his choreography, with such insight and clarity that anyone can relate to it. It represents to me, the essence of what I strive for in my own practice – to be able to tell a personal story, to delve so deeply into it, that it can reach the humanity in everyone.

Dancer/ choreographer, Kamaria, interprets "Water" in studio

More than a year had passed since I had searched the streets of Harlem for Malcolm’s spirit, even making my own private trek to his burial ground. I was keen to experience a communal recollection of his life’s work and worth.

Their respect for the dead they were bearing

Oh lord ah never see so much crowd

Thousands and thousands singing aloud

And what they singing was

Power! in the hands of the people now!

~ The Mighty Duke, Memories of 1970

In the year 1970, a State of Emergency was declared on the islands of the young republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Early morning police raids rounded up the leaders of a movement that had shaken the newly appointed government of this former colony to its core. My father was among the youngsters shipped to a holding area on an island just off the northwest coast of the mainland.

Roughly three decades later, as my family sat around a heavy, hardwood dining table, we all had a clear view of this island from our vantage point on the mainland. Beyond the red-tiled balcony, over the waves of corrugated metal roofs and patches of trees and pitch, that stopped a few feet short of the island’s watery border, this uneven chunk of earth protruded from the ocean’s calm surface – a daily reminder of a history that was always close to home.

Looking in from the balcony, one would observe eight or so people, seated around a wooden table laden with food – two bearded, older men, several younger men, and women of different ages all gathered together. Uncle Winston and Baba, their chest-length beards, more grey than black by this time, heckle each other, with accusations of jailbird status and tales of the most memorable escapades of their prison days. Tears of laughter stream down the faces of their captive audience, adding salt to the matriarch’s cooking. The two veterans regale the diners with lighthearted accounts of a very serious period of their lives. A police beating had crippled one of Uncle Winston’s hands. Baba had been charged with sedition. Sister Beverly was shot and killed. This innocuous scene of a meal and laughter is the image of a family held together by a substance more essential and more binding than blood.

There are memories of instant graveyards

Though you tend to turn your sleeping eyes further away

From the protesting voice of the people

Leading a justified struggle to find a better way

~Lord Shorty, Le La

I grew up inhaling the substance of the long shadow cast by my parents’ involvement in the Black Power Rebellion of 1970, in Trinidad and Tobago. As unavoidable and pervasive as the mythical ether, the breadth of its influence has proven equally as difficult to gauge.

In examining the ‘70s, historians and social scientists have pieced together an account of the events. The impact of the movement within the society and throughout the region has been recorded and analysed.

I have decided to focus on the movement from the inside out – looking at those whose lives were most deeply affected by it, those who reaped the benefits of a new vision and carried the burdens of notoriety; those whose involvement transported them into a new phase of the movement, fleshing out the subculture that sprung out of that period, and populating it with their own offspring; those who distanced themselves and their children from their prior participation; those who fed the silence surrounding 1970; those who whose voices rose in a new direction. I want to know, what happened? After all was said and done, prisoners released, wounds healed, names changed, lives lost, migrations finalized, new careers and lives forged, families reunited or forever rent apart, where did the “Black Power People” go? How were the lives of their children affected by their actions? What do they know that other people might not?

I formally call it “a multigenerational exploration of the aftermath of the Black Power Movement of Trinidad and Tobago”. I am, in reality, seeking out other folks who may have stories of dinnertimes similar to my own, who might add another dimension to my understanding of this phenomenon that so shaped my life and thinking, I am searching for the rest of my family to ask, “How has it been for you?”

My first attempts to reconcile the Harlem of my instant replay memories, with the Harlem that existed as a solid, sensory experience, included a photographic investigation of the life and memory of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Malcolm X.

Malcolm X embodied, for me, as Ossie Davis so eloquently put it, “Black Manhood”. An autodidact with a fierce sense of integrity, Malcolm was unwavering with his demands for justice and as he grew in stature and prominence, the world bore witness to the evolution of his ideology and the dawn of an icon.

The epitome of courage, commitment and selflessness, Malcolm towered as eternally youthful, brilliant and beautiful, in my mind. My search would be for a hero un-withered by the passage of time. I ran along the boulevard renamed for him, and shot the mosque that he founded – a towering, boxy, green-and-yellow structure that still bears his name. I found corners that he stood upon, the chain pharmacy that stood in place of his favourite café, and chatted with the Nation of Islam recruits of today who hawked DVD’s of Malcolm’s speeches. I made my way to Queens to shoot the last home that he shared with his family. As I traced Malcolm’s footsteps I came closer to the site of his murder in Washington Heights. Eventually I entered the Audubon Ballroom. I found a plain room, lined on either side with non-intrusive monitors – once again, a life in black-and-white, on instant replay. Atop a slightly raised platform, stood an unmoving, life-sized, bronze Malcolm.

I could not address Malcolm’s life, without delving into his death. I began to search for references outside of the restrictions of the US Civil Rights Movement to cope with my uncertainty in the face of (im)mortality. Malcolm’s role as a leader and an activist grazed the most tender regions of my awareness as I beheld, from a geographical distance, my own parents as activists and leaders themselves, who had spent most of their lives, pressing for changes in their own society. After the catalyst is removed, is there enough momentum for the change to continue? Does anyone remember its origin? Can a lifetime of work be easily undone, dissipated in a generation or two? Or can an individual truly carve an indelible mark into human consciousness and effect a significant and lasting change in the course of the world?

Pablo Neruda wrote to his wife and his people about death, mourning and remembering as he contemplated his own mortality. His words became the mantra for my meditation.

I followed the bitter end of Malcolm’s life, from the site of his assassination at the Audubon, to the funeral home that prepared his body for burial and the church where his public funeral service was held. I left the former meeting hall, now a sterile unremarkable room but for the conspicuous mural depicting Malcolm’s life. I did not feel any spiritual connection, or experience any jolts of awareness. I did not find scratched floors or a bullet-riddled wall or an old chair or podium. Instead I encountered a group of cheerful women getting ready for a day’s work. I shot the metal face downstairs, and the facades of the church and funeral home closer to Central Harlem, unsure of what else to do.

I took the Metro-North to Ferncliff Cemetery and found the gravesite of Malcolm X and his beloved Betty, in a section of the cemetery where the ground was upturned, presumably for replanting the lawn. An African liberation flag fluttered just above the gravestone, supported by a mound of red-brown dirt. Little mementoes had been left at his grave – a letter, indecipherable from its weathering, a tiny ring inscribed with the word “INSPIRATION”, the links of a chain…

The beast that devours its own offspring, regurgitating statues, stamps and street signs in place of its living, breathing child, allowed me to glimpse its bloody fangs before retreating into impeccable camouflage.

I resurrected Malcolm in a series of clenched fists that I photographed throughout Central Harlem. Women and men, and excited children participated in my project even as they queried my need for a tangible display of homage to Malcolm.

I closed the project with Malcolm’s own script, blown up to poster size, reading “ “As salaam alaikum (Peace be unto you).

Love,

Malcolm X”

detail of a work at the Noguchi Museum

After my trip to the Noguchi Museum, I could only wonder why I had not known his name before. How many times do we pass a work of art in a public space without really thinking about where it came from? From which stage of an artist’s practice did this evolve? Why was this particular artist selected over others to produce a work for a specific space? How does this art change the space?

I had to leave Manhattan to get to the museum. Queens felt ten degrees colder than the city. I bumbled around for several disconcerting minutes on exiting the train, before I could tell north from south and east from west. I eventually chose a ‘likely’ direction and began to walk. A smiling woman with a foreign accent confirmed that I was heading in the right direction. My surroundings did not distract me from the slightly uncomfortable temperature. I could see to the very ends of each road I met since the buildings were essentially flat and their faceless, unremarkable presence taunted me from both sides of the road. Traffic lights were as limited as the traffic and I crossed the streets without a sense of urgency. This was the ambition, drive and ‘big city’ speed of New York diluted to a point of blandness and it was unpalatable to me. I could not get to the museum fast enough.

The Noguchi Museum made my uninspired stroll from the subway an insubstantial price to pay for what I would eventually behold. The works were like individuals, each inviting the viewer to know a unique and compelling story; each saying that a prolonged gaze was worth more than a brief glance; that a caress would yield more than a visual inquiry. Of course it was strictly forbidden to touch, and I had to settle for doing a 360, top-to-bottom scan of each structure. I wondered out of the “late works” that populated the first few galleries and a rock garden, and into an earlier and more colourful period. Italian marble in brilliant hues and ambrosial patterns grew twisted, polished and tubular out of metal bases. Smooth, flawless planes merged into raw, glittering facets. Stone spouted water and turned into glass. A black sun, flamed at midnight. Obsidian, basalt, white marble, galvanized aluminium, cedar – just a few of the materials whose voices sang at the hands of a genius.

How many hours I spent there, I can’t be sure. By the time that hunger had gotten the better of me, I devoured a turkey salad and joined a free tour, legs aching, and brain bursting with the splendor of it all. How could something as still and immutable as stone appear to be in a state of emergence, or motion?

Still in a pleasant daze, I followed my newly acquired group to the second floor of the museum, where yet more diverse and stunning work awaited me.  I listened in on the group discussions about a couple of pieces and began making my way back to the city.