Barbados in colour

Blog series Americas and Oceania

Author Tia Bannon is an interdisciplinary artist (actor, photographer and writer) from Ladbroke Grove, London and the Eccles Institute Photography Creative Fellow at the British Library.

Sometimes hot pinks and violets across fluffs of white, others burning oranges gradating to golden hues. More time tucked behind sheets of grey, among towering buildings in the London skyline. Not all sunsets are the same.

One of my favourite places to see one is across the west coast of Barbados, bobbing in the calm of the Caribbean sea, scaling its bed for Barracuda teeth. Barbados, the place of my Grandmother's birth. I sometimes picture her there in the water, imagining if she’d marvelled at the same landscape whilst the taste of salt laps at her mouth. Or her mother before her, or hers before too, us beneath these magically rendered sunsets. My body the marker of lineage, an amalgamation of all these places we call home.

In reaching for deeper understandings of the places I am of, I have become fascinated with the life of photography across the Caribbean. As part of my time here as the Eccles Institute Creative Photography Fellow, I’ve discovered images chronicling Caribbean Islands in photo-books, exhibition pamphlets and historical textbooks. Photographs and illustrations. I’ve also found them beyond, in the texts of travelogues and commodity booklets promoting the sale of items such as arrowroot, cotton and syrup.

Among the collection items is the book Seven Photographers: An Exhibition of Photographic Images that was published as an accompaniment to an exhibition held across the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination, Queen’s Park and, and the now closed Zemicon Galleries, in Barbados in 2009. Featured among the book's pages are the works of seven male photographers who are instrumental to the photographic histories of and on the island. The images displayed range from studio portraits and landscapes to sports and street photography. With works ranging from 1918 to 2009, a breadth of photographic techniques was also utilised, encompassing both analogue and digital practices.

Interested in understanding, through my research, the evolution of photographic archival autonomy in Barbados, particularly for the island's Black population and descendants of the enslaved, I was drawn to the work of Percé Tappin.

Born in 1892 in St. Philip, after a venture overseas to study law at Howard University in the United States, Tappin became enamoured by photography and diverged from his potential career as a lawyer to ultimately set up a photographic practice in Barbados.

Starting first with the ‘Tappin Art Studio’ on the island, Tappin then founded studios across islands he visited in places such as Aruba, Grenada and Guadeloupe. His work in both portraiture and landscapes, as well as his studio expansion, helped not only to contribute to earlier photographic documentation of the island of Barbados but also to expand photographic practice across Caribbean islands as a whole.

I was particularly drawn to his landscape images in the book. Utilising the technique of hand-painting – a technique he was known for – Tappin was able to render his handprinted B&W photographs in colour, providing representations of the nature and beauty of the island.

Across a double page are a set of images titled Bathsheba I and Bathsheba II. The two images could almost be mistaken for the same picture depicted twice in different colours: the same hilly panorama, the bubbling of the Atlantic Ocean meeting the east coast, but there is the movement in the clouds, the shifted positions of large rocks that foreground the images.

The colours are different too, the sky rendered a petrol blue in one, pastures green and verdant, in the other, the mead is yellower, the sea foam white and peaking. I imagine he set his camera in almost the same spot, almost the same posture to make these works. I like this idea that he returned to Bathsheba over and over again, to other places, to discover their newness, their sameness and banality, the beauty of the everyday.

These images were made in 1954, and although colour film had entered markets in places like the US and UK by this time, it wasn’t widespread in the Caribbean until the 1970s. Tappin was likely utilising the hand-painting technique out of necessity, but his brush work provided so much more. With his photographer’s eye, we view the world from his perspective, with his paintbrush, we get to experience it from his inner life, the colours that his brain renders, the painted mood of heat and salt, breeze and trees.

At this point in my research, beyond this book and some short writings on the internet, I’ve managed to discover little else about Tappin and his work. It seems he was a man led by his passions and the romance of life. I wonder what he felt and thought while creating this work, whether he would grasp its significance.

For me, his images hold new and old memories, places where I can see the places I am of, from thousands of miles and many, many years away. As I continue on with this fellowship, I look forward to uncovering what more might exist in the archive and navigating its spaces of silence and beyond.

You can order Seven Photographers: An Exhibition of Photographic Images at the British Library.

You can follow me on instagram @tiabannon. You can read my Substack, Negative Space, about all types of archiving.