Samantha Box’s collage shows Caribbean exports

After 12 years of photographing queer youth in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, photographer Samantha Box realized around 2018 that this kind of documentation no longer appealed to her.

“I don’t believe in documentary photography anymore,” she told art news during a visit to her Bronx studio in October. “I don’t believe in the ability to ask multiple questions or even create space for questions. I don’t think I should necessarily be doing this job.”

To create her “Invisible” series, Box spent eight hours each night documenting the lives of queer young people who relied on Sylvia House, the city’s The only emergency shelter for LGBTQ+ homeless youth. Nowhere to go. In these photographs, she captures the intimacy of community and selected families, seen in spaces where her subjects are able to be their authentic selves without fear.

She found that the dominant narrative was that they were kicked out of their homes by their families after coming out, which was not a typical scenario for many young people being placed in shelters. Instead, many are victims of institutional policies like Clinton-era adoption laws that continue to destroy black families. A photo from the 2007 Invisible series shows Coco leaving foster care, then finding a place in a shelter and visiting her mother’s grave.

Boxer abandoned her documentary approach and began photographing the Caribbean food she grew up with as a way to turn her lens inward and create a new documentary about her own story. The resulting series, “Caribbean Dreams,” doesn’t feature juicy tropical fruits and vegetables strategically placed on tables in the manner of Dutch still lifes. Instead, Bocks leaves the mass-produced products she photographs in containers. Sometimes, she inserts herself into the picture. She often collages receipts from grocery stores for purchasing these items into the finished product. exist a kind of story, For example, Box paired a large pixelated self-portrait with surrounding photos of female family members.

Through these photographs, Box hopes to address the commodification of food exported to Caribbean diaspora communities around the world. (She named the series after a company involved in exporting.) The Dutch still lifes depict wealth and decadence, while Box’s version illustrates her experience as an expatriate Jamaican who immigrated to New Jersey as a child, itself How it is commodified and fabricated.

“She uses this very complicated relationship with the idea of ​​a nostalgic home to really talk about the diaspora experience in this beautiful and complex way,” says Mia Laufer, curator of three current exhibitions themed around Box. Mia Laufer said.

Laufer’s exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa (on view through January 19) focuses specifically on the “Caribbean Dreams” series, while the “Confluence” exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. (on view through March 23 ) presents “Caribbean Dreams” alongside “Invisible” for the first time. Highlighting the older series, Confluence curator Orin Zahra said she wanted to show “these young people living very nuanced and complex lives.” Life, a life filled with joy, sorrow, love and reflection. I think these are common emotions that we can all relate to. ”

For the exhibitions in Des Moines and Washington, D.C., Box added an aural element to “Caribbean Dreams.” flashcards A set of images shows the artist holding different foods; below each image is a small sample of the labeled food. In the gallery, visitors heard Box and her mother speak in distinctive American and Trinidadian accents, respectively, the names of food items Box bought at the Bronx Greenmarket.

When she buys fruits and vegetables from the green market to make flashcardsBox said she was “thinking hard about the idea of ​​these fruits and vegetables as moving objects—objects that move within global currents of commodification, both historical and contemporary, and that trace the histories of enslaved and enslaved people. way.”Contractor. “

Box’s current third exhibition, “Home/Land” at the Camera Club of New York on Baxter Street (through December 21), pairs her “Caribbean Dreams” images with the work of Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani Paired with her photography, which also takes as its subject the eighties, international politics forced her family to leave Iran as political refugees.

Citing Dutch still life painting, Bocks “situates herself within a canon of art, photography, and painting that often do not have enough representation of women, especially women of color,” in the “Home/Land” exhibition. In the six years since she began writing Caribbean Dreams, Box has followed a series of inquiries that have allowed her to view her home country through a critical lens on her adopted homeland. “In some ways, ‘Caribbean Dreams’ wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t lived in the Bronx,” she said. “For example, if I lived in Flatbush, I think I probably wouldn’t have made the connections that I started with.”