My current work looks at the quarantine of 300 Trinidad and Tobago nationals trapped by COVID-19 aboard the cruise ship Enchantment of the Seas. My photographs respond to how deeply the imposed isolation has affected the cruise ship workers on this vessel, and others like it, and by extension, how the pandemic continues to redefine our very way of life. We are currently in a perfect storm—the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, lockdown, the stubborn racial divide. There was an actual tropical storm the day I photographed the cruise ship—everything spinning.
Abigail Hadeed has been documenting the Caribbean and the Americas for the past 30 years. Hadeed’s archives owe much to her uncanny ability to discover people and places at the crossroads of an unresolved past and an impending future, torn between pain and possibility, disquiet and hope. My last exhibition The Weight of Water was a meditation on nature and alienation…pollution, consumption, and the link between environmental and spiritual degradation. Unpeopled and introspective, It coursed through Trinidad’s waters to as far north as the Bahamas archipelago.
