All posts tagged: Photography

Creative Youth: Reevaluating Our Values and the Work of Young People

16 November 2017 Articles

By Dr Ian Bethell Bennett.  The Bahamas has quickly become a country with multilayered and multifaceted youth conflicts.  Over the last ten years, these issues have taken the fore and removed the focus from real and positive change.  Violence, youth disengagement and youth disaffection can be addressed through creative expression and creative practice.  However, in a school system that argues for a focus on the STEM and not STEAM, but without any real engagement–where art and performance are seen as outside and unwanted stepchildren–it is significant that some young Bahamians are excelling in their work and their creative expression. 

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From the Collection: “A Distant View of Nassau” (c.1857-1904) by Jacob F. Coonley

15 November 2017 Articles

By Natalie Willis.  Looking at this photograph, “distant” is certainly apt in different facets of the word. It is a distant, far off view. It is a distant time, a bygone era. It is also a distant idea to think of Nassau in this way – so largely uninhabited with stretches of green bush for miles, sisal and rocky paths to illustrate this difficult land – formerly difficult for our floral inhabitants, now harder for the people living in what feels like harsh social terrain. The reactions witnessed to this image are very telling, the astonishment on locals faces when they try to imagine a Nassau like this seems like having to tell someone to imagine us in prehistoric times, not just over 200 years ago. That surprise speaks to the way the development has become so utterly integral to our identity in the capital, and truly the country as a whole.

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From The Collection: “A Native Sugar Mill” (ca. 1901) by William Henry Jackson

12 June 2017 Articles

By Natalie Willis. “A Native Sugar Mill” (ca. 1901) by William Henry Jackson is part of the suite of historic colonial photographs in the National Collection. Jackson was an American, who started a photo studio here after emigrating from New York in the 1870s and is one of the small group of colonial migrants whose pictures help us piece together part of the story of the time. According to the catalogue for “Bahamian Visions: Photographs 1870 – 1920,” curated by Krista Thompson, Jackson first came to The Bahamas at the request of the Governor of the time, Sir William Robinson, in 1877. Since around 1856, Jackson worked as a landscape painter, colourist of photographs and also owned a studio specialising in Daguerreotype photographs. In addition, he manufactured albumenized paper, managed a stereoscopic printing shop and had even worked as a Civil War photographer. Many of these things seem very far removed from us now, but they were staples of photography at the time.

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Look, Listen, Live: A Space for Artistic and Cultural Expression

20 January 2017 Articles

The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas(NAGB) has created a space we call the National Exhibition, now on its eighth run.  The NE8 offers local artists and artists of the diaspora a space to express their ideas and thoughts, concepts and theories. This week Dr. Ian Bethell-Bennett writes about the documentary photographic work of Tamika Galanis currently based in North Carolina and her investigation into the Over-the-Hill communities of Grants Town and Bain Town.

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Noted Photographer Antoine Ferrier Passes Away

11 November 2016 In memory

Noted local photographer Antoine Ferrier sadly passed away on Sunday, November 6th after a short illness. He died at the Princess Margaret Hospital, on his birthday, at the age of 75. Charles Antoine Ferrier was born in Gonaives on November 6, 1941 in The Republic of Haiti. During the course of his formative years and early adulthood, he pursued and completed his formal education in Port-au-Prince.

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