Samantha Box (b. 1977, Kingston, Jamaica) uses photography to question societal structures, while also expressing her post-colonial critique of the medium itself. The artist’s two major bodies of work, “The INVISIBLE Archive” and “Caribbean Dreams,” are now on view in Samantha Box: Confluences at NMWA. Seen together for the first time, these series reveal layered conversations around the intersectionality of nationality, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. In this two-part series, NMWA Associate Curator Orin Zahra shares insights about each body of work.
Caribbean Dreams
After nearly two decades focusing on documentary works, in 2018 Box shifted to a studio practice for her ongoing project “Caribbean Dreams.” This series continues her exploration of liminal spaces, this time with herself as subject. Her early still lifes recall the lush tableaux of 17th-century Dutch painting and the imperial expansion of the so-called Dutch Golden Age, as Box connects the exploits of colonialism with sumptuous, ripened fruit, family heirlooms, and vintage photographs. For the artist, the Caribbean “doesn’t have a shape or form”; instead, it “exists everywhere, appears everywhere.”
Mirror #1 (2019) sees Box looking at her reflection in the mirror. Placed in front of her like one of her still-life arrangements are a tin cake box, bouquet of lilies, and cup of tea. She intentionally depicts her studio in the Bronx as the setting, as if showing a theater or film stage with props, her camera equipment openly visible. Although Box reflects on the ways in which conceptions about the Caribbean were born from colonial imaginings, her images also mirror her personal experiences. As the daughter of an Indian Trinidadian mother and Black Jamaican father, Box is acutely aware of being shaped by the diaspora. The family’s migration from the artist’s native Jamaica to central New Jersey added yet another layer to her diasporic identity.
In One Kind of Story (2020), Box surrounds an image of herself with photographs of her maternal relatives, including her mother, grandmother, and great-aunt. A pixelated image of the artist draws our eyes toward the center of the composition. She sits with raised arms, in a pose modeled after the 19th-century photograph Young Indian Woman (ca. 1890–96) by Félix Morin, a French photographer, who operated a studio out of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. Such historical images were used as postcards for white tourists.
Box’s still-life images highlight the capitalist enterprise of colonialism in the Caribbean, weighed down with the histories of enslaved peoples and forced servitude. Visible product stickers and grocery receipts allude to the transactional relationships of colonialism. Encompassing many aspects of her identity—Black, queer, immigrant—Box’s self-image-making acts as an antidote to the historical weaponization of the camera toward the “other” by colonial powers.
Join Us!
Samantha Box: Confluences in on view at NMWA through March 23, 2025. The artist will be in conversation with filmmaker Kristen Lovell (pictured in Kristen, on 34th Street, on her way to work on the stroll (2008)) at NMWA on Wednesday, January 29, 2025, in Fresh Talk: Photography and Advocacy.