I see memory and family as fragmented, pieced together through images, telling multiple overarching narratives of cultural identity, mythology passed down through generations. Myths, like photographs, exist somewhere between truth and fabrication, exactly where I position myself as an artist.
Audre Lorde defines biomythography as a dynamic combination of history, biography, and myth. This is exactly how I think about photographs, as “fiction built from many sources.” I use this idea to embrace elements of fantasy embedded in culture, family, and selfhood.
One of my greatest influences is Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel Cane, a sequence of vignettes about Black people in America. Its palpable imagery (ferns, cane, purple dusk) and poignant subjects shake me to my core. I experiment similarly: smoke rising against a corrugated fence, silhouetted figures on patterned curtains, bone white dominos arranged as mandala. Each image bears its own subtle and suggestive qualities; together they weave a dream-like narrative, dancing around a greater concept.
As the daughter of a Jamaican father and Jewish mother, I’m fascinated by mythologies of home, and how my black identity intersects with my family histories. I explore these themes through my ongoing project, Shadow of the Palm, a lyrical, uncanny collection of images, mainly photographed in Brooklyn and Jamaica. The pictures are inspired by driving with my father through the mountains in Saint Mary, Jamaica, where he grew up, as he described a recurring dream: he tries to catch a bus on this very road, but misses it and has to climb over the mountain. It’s disorienting, listening to someone’s dream while physically moving through its landscape. I photograph to capture such traces of the unexplainable. This strangeness of going “home” is part of why I obscure faces in many of my portraits and integrate shadow. Without something firm to hold onto, you look for what you remember. Maybe you find it. More often you find something else.
As counterpart to making pictures in Jamaica, I photograph in my Nana’s backyard in Brooklyn. It is a place she has created to keep alive the memories of home in Jamaica. The activities that happen here - playing Ludi, blasting reggae, jerking chicken - become a cultural mythology for the next generation - myself included. We all tell ourselves origin stories that mix reality and myth. When I examine this innate human desire, I find an endlessly beautiful source of photographic inspiration.
