Almost three years ago to the day, I made my first journey here, back home to this place where my paternal grandmother is from. That journey was in some ways an attempt to discover, to trace a lineage and a land I’d been estranged from, in search of answers–in search of myself. I learnt a lot, met some biological family members–and found a few chosen ones–doused my food in Bajan pepper sauce and tried to bend my mouth around the singsongy rhythms of de accent. I learnt that in quarrying the past the sediment becomes fluid; with every answer there will always be more questions.

Over the next few weeks, my learning here focuses on understanding the photographic archive documenting Black Bajans in the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s. Photography was invented in 1826, with the daguerreotype process coming along in 1839. Michael Ayre states in his book, The Caribbean in Sepia, that photography made its way to the region in the 1840s, although very few of the images from that time have survived. I am fascinated by the early photographic period—particularly in the anglophone Caribbean—as it coincided with the end of formal enslavement. It is of course important to note that the impacts of colonial governance and extraction continued long after this period, reinforcing uneven levels of financial and mobility access for subjugated groups across the Caribbean, that have implications even today. Engagement with early photographic technologies such as the expensive daguerreotype was largely limited to colonial officials, medical related professions and those who could afford such novelties.

My side quest into academia over the past year (alongside acting and my other creative pursuits) has deepened my fascination with photography, and the photograph as a material object. If the early photographic archive was largely created by white colonial officials and ‘ethnographic’ chroniclers through an imperial lens, how were Black and brown Caribbean subjects represented? And who was being permitted to enter such an archive? Most archival encounters have left me feeling frustrated, a pocket of fury between my eyebrows as I frown at another 19th-century postcard of an alleged Market Woman captured in a studio setup for the imperial gaze. Mauby Woman, Cake Seller, Pig Seller. People who look like me, my antecedents, who remain nameless and reduced in the recording of history.

I’m interested in trying to understand how we can use such a fragmented archive to further interrogate the effects of enslavement and colonialism on the family histories of the enslaved and their descendants. Photographs are portals—the absence of them portals too—doors through which we might learn more about the past and its impact on our present. In coming to Barbados to spend time in the archives here, I aim to recentre the island and access from within. I’m not sure what I’ll discover in the local collections and what they might reveal to me. Hope seems a futile or misplaced emotion—is there a word for a deep longing to know?

It is the absence of my own paternal family photos that has led me here—and, of course, other absences as well. What I am missing feels similar to the grief of knowing I’ll have to leave a place I’ve only just begun to understand and have simultaneously known all along. To leave the sunset chime of the whistling frogs that lullaby the island until dawn breaks.

In the morning I wake up just before five. Bleary-eyed, I check my phone—which is a habit I hate—and the weather app tells me that the sun will rise in 40 minutes. I move soft out of the house, start the car and make my way to the beach.

I take the route I have driven many times before, to the east of the island where the sun rises. On the way there are new potholes and old familiar ones. Red chiffon curtains in the windows of a chattel house. Down the long road to the coast, I pray for no other cars so I can make the tight U-turn to get back out again. At Crane beach, iridescent blue crabs scuttle and scale the walkway’s boulders on diagonal paths; a large one basks in a pool of water formed in a cratered rock. Towards the limestone cove, the walkway has buckled further since I was here last, so I sit on its edge instead of climbing down to the sandy shore. The crashing water sprinkles salt dew on my lips. I try to journal, but I am distracted by a gust of wind that has blown a postcard sent to me by a friend onto the sea-soaked ground. The ink of his words watery and cobalt. I try to capture them in my memory in case they fade.

Each time I come to Barbados, I attempt to give myself what I missed out on as a child, to stymie a longing and create a tether that is tangible. Although you cannot catch up with what was once, or truly go back in the now. This grief is for a yesterday, running alongside the time that we do have. Archives in buildings, behind email invitations and academic texts, bodies that carry bloodlines and whispers of dreams–they are all incomplete. The mourning is tied to the living. Maybe it is part of the reason for it, the thing that propels us.

The sun rises behind a misty veil, revealing the slow drift of light. The heat hits as the breeze turns warm. And gently the day is here. A day that is the gift of time, to make do with it what we can.

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A row of antique Dickens’ books occupied its top teak shelf, fronted by photo frames filled with pictures of her grandchildren, and eventually great-grandchildren when they were born. I remember one of my brother, in a porcelain frame, white with tiny lilac flowers that danced up its side. There was a pocket in the back where you slid the photo in. It was a portrait that must have been taken at his school; his pose had a sweet formal quality to it, and there was a wash over it that felt like a time from before I was born.

Below that, the Librenza had another shelf, which was more of a floating cupboard, with sliding doors that you opened by dragging your finger against a small, sleek brass ring. The cabinet at the base of the shelving unit clicked a clunky metal sound when you opened its vertical door, and in the walnut-coloured drawers to it

s left-hand side were the serviette rings and types of silverware I wouldn’t know how to use.

Across the top of the lower cabinet and drawers was the sideboard platform. On it lay a bowl of fake fruits: plastic gummy grapes, a too-shiny red apple, a peach, thin fuzzed with teeth marks in it.

My mother tells me the Librenza came from my great-great-grandfather’s shop. My great-great-grandfather, fleeing Russia in the early 1900s, set up a furniture shop called Marks—our family name—in Stockton on Tees. In 1939, the shop was passed down to my great-grandfather, who one day, fitted out his daughter’s home with a brand new G-Plan Librenza, which now, many years later, stands in the hallway of my childhood home.

The Librenza is the first thing you see when you enter our front door. However, you might not see it. The hallway is dark, but since it has lived in our house, the piece of furniture itself has become a vessel of requirement, a holding space for clutter: half-opened letters and single gloves, bowls of miscellaneous items, crumpled receipts, and copious, possibly dead batteries. The Dickens books—my unspoken inheritance—still sit stacked on the shelf. Along the top, on the shelf my Nana never used, are two vases—one made of glass, the other white plastic and bobbly––they flank the garnet coloured bag that holds my Nana’s ashes.

Approaching the tenth anniversary of my Nana’s passing, I decided it was time for a change; it was time to unburden the Librenza. I started, how I often do, without a plan. Alone, I began shifting bundles of scarves and shabby canvas bags into haphazard piles on the floor. Things that belonged to family members, those who had lived and laid their heads in the house in recent years.

I took the Dickens books down off the shelf, their spines fragile and flaking, and carefully placed them on the floor in a room upstairs. Among the jumble, I found outdated stamps and lonely pen lids, spark-less lighters, a splattering of coins and that earring I’d lost. I moved on to the drawers, and inside one, there were rolls and rolls of all kinds of tape, at least four pairs of scissors.

I stopped when I found the serviette rings buried beneath the miscellany. I remembered them being weightier, gold patterns embossed into the leather banding. At Nana’s, I’d lay the table, roll pristine white serviettes and place them inside the rings, put down the thick placemats, spread the cutlery in places I can’t quite remember now. Often, the TV would be on, a pre-watershed soap or medical procedural humming along in the background as my Nana shuffled to tend to rumbling pots jostling on the gas stove. Setting the table wasn’t something we did back home; here, it was a responsibility I relished. When I made solo visits to hers, we’d share a roast regardless of the day. She’d divide the broccoli and cauliflower she’d bought in a mixed pack from Morrisons into a split serving dish, as I preferred one and she the other. I’d make the gravy, heaped teaspoons of Bisto that withered in boiling water, then coagulated and clung to a mug.

I found the split serving dish in the drop-down cupboard, stippled with lint. The plates were there too, with their winding pattern and speckled dots. The sliding doors shushed like a librarian, juddering slightly as I dragged them to one side. Then there was treasure. Her marmalade pot, its bulbous shape with the word HONEY across it. I moved my finger over its raised, bold font. I remembered the mornings in her last flat, where I’d wake up to her quietly sipping a steaming tea. Paper fanned out across the table. She’d be wrapped in a gossamer-thin dressing gown, the early morning light blinking through the net curtains. Toast standing in the frames of a toast rack. The marmalade jar just beside it. I thought I didn’t like marmalade. I miss that red velvet sofa.

There were things I hadn’t seen before. A standout, a mug commemorating the Queen's Silver Jubilee. I never knew what she thought about the Royal family; there were so many things I didn’t know about my Nana.

I took everything out.

Standing on a chair, I carefully moved her ashes off the top of the Librenza and placed them on the counter in the kitchen. I’d made peace with her physical absence some time ago. I found her in the call of the seagulls in London, found her in handwriting that looked just like hers on a random piece of paper in a shop, in lilacs and violets. This isn’t the same for others in my family, but we all grieve differently.

Once the Librenza was clear, I began the task of trying to move it. The balmy air wrapped itself around my biceps as I attempted to embrace it into a new position. I took breaks to stretch my spine. Using my hip, I thrust to push its body over the threshold of the hallway to the kitchen. Bent my knees in some attempt to support the muscles.

I let it rest in the centre of the room. Amber light poured in through the back door window. Its rays fell on the Librenza, revealing small dents and nicks in the wood that glinted like tossed wishes in a fountain. It looked naked and frail. Tired.

Along the back, a deep layer of thick dust had settled on its edges. I wiped it off in one satisfying swoop, then sprayed a berry-scented cleaner that smelt more like sherbet onto the wood and buffed at its surface. I made the brass fittings shine exquisitely—polishing the glass and silver was one of the many games we played when we stayed at Nana’s.

In the space behind the sliding doors, a beige lining had been stuck down. It’s not something I remember. Regardless of whether it was there as part of the original assembly or not, now it was awkward looking, the lining had shifted against the shelf’s base and crumpled to form an unmoving ridge. I pulled an antibacterial wipe from its packet, the plastic crunching, and leaned in to begin.

My eyes adjusted to the half-light in the cupboard, and on the lining I saw a small curl of hair. And closer still, bits of dust. I was sweating. I felt cold. My Nana had big barrel ringlets. Auburn as a child. That I knew. Was that her hair?

The wetness of the chemicals began to irritate my skin. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to wipe away the places she had been. The last traces of her. The wipes' synthetic citrus scent stung my eyes.

Five or six generations. This piece of furniture has been in my family for five or six generations. I was scared to clean it on the inside because it felt like I was erasing her somehow. A chip of her red nail polish, the scent of her floral hand cream, if I dared to dream, maybe even a fingerprint. The pieces of my Nana that existed when she was living. When I had a chance to know her, here, on this plane.

I’ve been thinking about the importance of objects a lot recently. That’s a lie, I think about that often, but it's more present in my mind as I’ve been awarded a creative fellowship at the Eccles Institute at the British Library. We’ll get to this at some point, but, part of my fellowship requires me to spend a period of time researching and responding to the photographic collections and ephemera documenting the Caribbean and Latin America. Things that exist in a catalogue, behind glass and in filing cabinets. Things that aren’t always easy to access. But maybe there is memory all around us, there in our everyday.

I shifted the Librenza along to the back wall of the kitchen. Sliding the doors by their circular handles, I placed the chinaware back in its cupboard, the marmalade jar labelled HONEY, the Silver Jubilee mug that wobbled on the dodgy laminate. The Librenza. An inheritance. A relic of my lineage.

Sometimes the tangible is all we have. Maybe the intangible is somehow tactile, too. The memories, the feelings, the resonance of orality.

After my Nana died, I wished I could hear her voice. I still do. And I hear it in my head often—but, I wish you could hear it too.

I wish I could tell her I like cauliflower now.

That they cancelled Holby City.

I wish I could ask her more questions.

I wish she could see her Librenza now—our Librenza, standing pride of place in the kitchen, where the light just hits it, with the seagulls swarming overhead, cawing miles away from the sea.

The tertiary layer of my highly anticipated stand-up routine as mentioned here, is the topic of my dating life—perhaps we’ll come to the secondary layer another time, and the likely dose of dad-related issues in this sphere, but, for now, the dating life bar is too low to limbo under, and ‘hope’ often replaced by a fart in the wind.

What the hell, one of my best friends scoffs pushing another sour sweet into her mouth, the sugar dots forming a tutu around her lips. I’m sorry, but this is clearly romantic.

The maths was: the man from the internet and I had FaceTimed, again, for longer this time, then again, for even longer. In the interim, we’d also engaged, heavily, in modern pen-pallery, sending thoughts on our favourite books, music that expressed sonic emotionality, essay-like texts dissecting the multilayered practices of our contemporaries. Occasionally, a moment of vulnerability, a sharing of yesterday’s dreams, tomorrow’s ambitions. But there was no flirting, the only nudes being sent were images of heavily fingered paperbacks that we shared to compare book covers in the UK and US market.

But he said that thing to you.

Yes.

And you said you felt the same?

So…

Gosh, haven’t you seen that film?

Only up to the bit where it felt like Nora had to make a decision—look, it’s just an intellectual dickdowning, platonic. Mutual.

Okay, she said. Sure.

We meet in person on the date of the US election. From the ground I peel an I Voted Early sticker half stamped into gravel and tuck it in my pocket. The restaurant we were supposed to eat at smells like warm ammonia and cat. Early—for once, I step outside and try to remember what direction Solid State Books was in, I’d lived in D.C. for a few months the year before, whilst doing a play. Then suddenly, he’s here and we cascade into one another. I explain the cat and wee situation. He suggests we find somewhere else. We tumble off like ribbons down H Street, breath struggling to get a word in over our conversation.

We decide on Laotian. It’s my first time. The host seats us at a rounded table and we slide next to each other on pillowy seats. Our chopsticks graze in silken sweet chili and crunchy garlic. Here he was, in flesh, more than just a floating head. Some things are the same—time hovers nearby unimposing. Some things are new, a different experience up close. When he laughs his teeth seem shy, the bridge of his nose wrinkles a tiny crunch. A loose curling baby hair has escaped from one of his braids. No—thank you, he says, I’m just happy to be supporting you.

In the morning, he meets me at my friend's apartment. You can use my notebook, he says, then carefully decants my heavier items into his bag and loops my camera around his neck.

I force him onto the back of an e-scooter—it’s quicker and cheaper. He grips my waist with a firm tentativeness. The city rolls. We fly. He tells me my hair smells nice—I haven’t washed it in days. At a set of traffic lights, a lone rider offers us a basset-hound smile. How you holding up? I ask him. Man, we gotta get through this, he says.

In August, I discovered an article detailing the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s acquisition of the Larry J. West collection of early American Photography. The collection, redefining the history of photography, featured rare photographs from the First African American studios. I sent an email to an info@ address requesting a visit to see it. To my surprise, I got one back, from a curator that said: No. Well, it was a half-no, the collection won’t be on display until 2026. A no—but, that led to a zoom and an impromptu presentation of my work, which meant that one day a 'yes, we’d love to have you' arrived in my inbox.

Outside SAAM, he says he’s never getting on a scooter again. The elevator lands us on the 7th floor before the curator has the chance to offer their feelings about today’s election results. In the viewing room, small caramel archival boxes lay in neat columns across two steel-legged tables.

I’ve picked out some pieces that feel relevant, the curator explains, rolling a pair of white cotton gloves over their digits. The rules are simple: we are not allowed to touch anything, but we can point to the artefacts and the curator will handle them. Notes can be made in pencil, only. No photos.

Most of the images are of Black people, dressed in fine clothing, the detailing of their gold jewellery or pocket watches etched into the photographic plates surface. Most of the images were made by pioneering Black Photographers, James P. Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington.

I lean into the neck of a small perfume bottle, on its lid a tiny tintype, search for a scent. There are no names, save a speculated one. The daguerreotype, the first public available photographic process, was invented in 1839, wet plate collodion used for ambrotypes and tintypes in the 1850s. Back then, having your photo taken was a costly endeavour, often reserved for those who could afford it. The ‘abolishment’ of slavery in the British-occupying Caribbean began in 1834, without full ‘emancipation’ coming into effect around 1838, it was later for many other occupied islands and those in the U.S. Even still, ‘emancipation’ didn’t equate to access or equity.

Velvet-lined cases hold stories, beyond the image, in the oil of a fingerprint, in the skin cells and gathers of dust. I think about my own family, try to calculate if it was my great-great grandparents or their parents who were enslaved during that time. Did they ever have their picture taken? What about people they knew? If they did, I have no access to them. But, what about my friends back home, those who had tangible ties to roots? Who had access to documenting themselves back then?

A young girl stares out at me with certain eyes. Time has left mottled dots across the glass surface of her frame. I am moved by the formalness, the intention, the rarity. The choice. It’s special, I say, my voice balled into a squeak, but what about those who couldn’t afford to do this?

The curator pulls out their phone and scrolls to a picture of a picture of a Black woman holding a white baby. The baby is drenched in a halo of light. There is detail. The Black woman is lost in underexposed darkness.

I think it's a tintype, they say, late 1800s, she’s the nanny.

They show us another one, where the Black woman is shadow-like too, but this time blurry. Reliant on daylight, exposure times for these images started at upwards of three minutes. Perhaps the baby was trying to move and the woman holding it absorbed the impact to aid the sharpness in the final image. I think about these two women, how even though they are, in a rare occurrence, present, there is also an erasure.

We take a scooter to Union Station, giggling hysterically as the tiny battery drags us uphill to the parking bay. His fingers pad delicately on the touch screen as he types my government in to buy our train tickets. Salt-sticky hands we snack on hot chips and take sips from our boxes of apple juice, Autumn rushes by and conversation as ever, never ends as we speed on to Baltimore.

That evening we meet an oracle. Beads of plastic and wood on her wrists clack as she moves. She’s heartbeat. Rhythm. Her word is honey. Her cackles fireworks. Then sometimes her voice a chant. We feast on plantain, golden and glistening, rice and beans both firm and soft, zinging lemon peppered wings. Secure on corduroy seats, at times we grip each other's thighs or dart a gaze of what-the-actual-fuckery into one another's eyes, as she casually mentions verbatim things we had been speaking about today, and yesterday, before and back.

Night wins. On the train back to D.C., we sit reclining, melting into the leather. Our faces close enough to count lashes. For a moment, I feel his eyes linger on my lips. I try to peel them apart to speak, but they stick to each other. I use my tongue to break the seal.

The Amtrak from D.C. to New York is a popular route. The low din of the business commute scores our morning train ride back. I’ve got soft snacks for your jaw, I tell him. He smiles surprised. A small shape of seaweed hugs onto one of his milky teeth.

At Moynihan Station, he suggests we travel together through New York and I remind him we’re not heading in the same direction. He searches his phone for a route anyway. I say goodbye, commit to not looking back.

Later, he will tell me he thought we had more time.

The last time I see him it is by candle light. From a soaking bag he pulls out a dry package. We make a ceremony out of sanitising our hands.

It’s what I’ve been telling you about, I’m so excited to show you.

When his great-grandmother passed, he inherited an archive. Hundreds of Polaroids and images taken from the 60s onwards. She was precious to him, and it was precious that she had seen in him this chance to hold and continue something so important. We brush lint from the tablecloth, steam whispers atop our hot toddies. One by one he hands me an image. I’m careful to hold them at their thickest window edge. You can date some of them by a crack in the emulsion, you see here, he says, as he places another Polaroid in front of me. A blur of colours, blues, browns, and reds. Bodies like smoke. He explains who one person is, then the next. We chart a room's transformation over its life: a wall stripped, then painted, then a trophy pride of place on a new shelf. Someone on a sofa. At some point, small him on the same sofa. Shy teeth still. And suddenly my eyes are hot and my cheeks are wet, and I tell him how remarkable this all is.

I use my thumb to massage the side of his jaw, drag it down the back of his neck, knead my fingers into his shoulder blades. Skin on skin. He liquifies. Leans into me. For the first time there are no words, only breath.

I’ve been thinking about this image for the show, his eyes land on mine. I’ve chosen it because of you. Because of your reaction to it—your openness.

And I think this is the thing that is romantic. How romantic it is to be seen and to see. To move and be moved.

The air feels juice with booze. I don’t usually drink, but they weren’t serving tea, and the cold wet called for something warm. I poke my finger into melting candle wax.

Yeah—I can’t do this, I say, I don’t think we can just be friends.

New York smells like steaming brine when it rains. There are things I want to say, he says, but I don’t want to make this worse. Two slicked rats dart by. Eventually, our taxi pulls up. Inside the heat is on, the driver mumbles on the phone, the radio is low but tinny. We half face each other in the back seat, our bodies like slouching number sevens dappled in passing flickers of light.

What you want, he says, I want it too. I’ve thought about it ever since we met on FaceTime.

I think you’re so and

and and and and

but what about

His partner.

and

but

I put it in a box, he says

And I want to tell him that we will work it out together—because I know I’m good at that.

but I don’t,

because I can’t,

there are things here that I cannot fix. Things for him to navigate. Things that belong to him.

In some ways I’ve been here before, wishing to be chosen.

He comes in for tea. The fortune on the tea tag says something I can’t remember now. He tells me I’m . I thank him. The whole apartment is made of wood. I close the door. I swallow grief, it tries to eat me.

Dad in absentia has taught me many things, or rather, my unpacking of his absence has. And here I take from the lesson of mourning something that never was. How bizarre to grieve something that is living. Something that had hope. Possibility.

We exchanged a few texts before I returned to London—the plan was to meet up, talk. But commitment felt thin, time came and went, and by the time I got on the plane, I hadn’t heard back from him. Ghosted. Until, he texted a week later. He mentioned suppressed thoughts and feelings.

I thought of those boxes. Those stories inside each one. The could of beens in all the boxes that don’t exist. It's time to open them all up.

It was an honour to have been given access to such rare archive at the Smithsonian. To engage with a part of our diasporic history, feel the impact of it.

When knowing knocked, along came everything else. And there is more to say on that—that time before. Before I knew the absence of archive, before it found me.

There will always be missing parts. In sharing this there are great chunks of detail omitted, because I want to keep people safe—whatever that means. Him. Me.

I met a man on the internet, who was intelligent and kind, his passion infectious, he moved with forensic curiosity. He drinks his coffee whilst watching the sunrise, has a healthy obsession with Toni Morrison and writers who can reimagine the page. I felt seen by him—I hope he felt seen by me. His teeth, delicate pearls. His brain seemed to be made of magic.

I open the box and pour out what could have been.

It is on trains and round tables the story of we gets to live, in words and blossoming ideas and photographs. And in the whispers at galleries, on the backs of humming scooters, and in spaces where time hovers gently. In the hope of a yesterday. In all the things we never got to learn about each other and all those things we’ll never get to say.

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There are many things that are lead-heavy about the absence of a parent—things like the effects of neglect on the developing brain, low self-esteem, wide-ranging attachment issues—things that have been written about by dedicated experts that I could effortlessly endorse. But right now, I’m mainly concerned with one thing: the absence of archive.

In the wake of my biological male DNA giver’s disappearance, I grew up surrounded by an all-white family. Raised by my white Welsh, Eastern European Jewish mother alongside my siblings, who had white fathers, I yearned for intragenerational cultural connections to my paternal Caribbean heritage. To master the method of my Bajan grandmother’s cou-cou recipe, rub my fingers between the threads of my Jamaican grandfather’s madras cloth shirts. To cotch at cookouts and spend hours nestled in the crook of my father’s sharp onion-scented armpit as we pored over photo albums, deciphering names on the backs of ageing prints, searching for our faces in those who came before us.

But don’t get it twisted: the word "intragenerational" is important here. This yearning has often been connected to something biological. In other ways, I have been blessed—raised up by the Caribbean community in my steady love—Ladbroke Grove, and in the paper plates at parties of chosen families, the pulse of carnival every August bank holiday weekend, and by unexpected father figures like those you meet on writing retreats who speak of your promise—in action. Or those that get you in with your local youth centre to practice your saxophone at 7 am on weekdays during term time, when there was nowhere else.

For a long time, all I could tell you about my male progenitor was his name. Growing up, I had one picture of him—I’ll come to it at some point. This picture, aside from its obvious sentimental value, as a piece of evidence, is utterly useless. His face shrouded by his pose, head tilted away, gaze down. The angle meant I couldn’t trace the outline of his nose, the curve of his lips. I couldn’t see his eyes.

With the rise of the internet, I typed his name into search bars. I scoured for potential images of him, clues, mere morsels I could gulp down to satiate this hunger for connection. For the most part, the direct hits were in the millions. To be fair, with a first name that’s the UK’s second most popular boy’s name over the last 500 years, and a last name ranking high among those who were enslaved across the Caribbean and United States, it’s no wonder he has been hard to find.

Disrespectfully, my father is highly skilled at being unreachable. So much so that we’ve likely boarded the groaning 52 bus at the same time, both of us none the wiser. Yes—there are things to unpack. But on these great journeys back to myself, I’ve been questioning: even if he was present, what difference would that make?

My work in photography largely centres around consensual portraiture, especially with regard to archive, past and present. Often, in the field, when making images of Caribbeans from across the diaspora, I engage in conversations that range from Why do you want to take a picture of me? to Yeah, no, we don’t have any family photos of our grandparents, certainly none of those who came before. If I did have a connection to my immediate family, would there be great access to archive? And how far back does that go? Were images carried on ships? First flights during Windrush?

There are big questions, ones that form the basis of my research and interests, the roots of what I want to share with you all: What effect has displacement had on our access to documenting and archiving ourselves, both individually and collectively?

A photograph can serve as evidence of something. The absence of a photograph can be evidence too. Photography was invented during a time when chattel slavery was still prominent. So who had access to documenting and archiving then, and how does that impact our access today?

What role do slavery and colonialism play in all of this? Words that often strike a tabooic like chord when mentioned, oh that was a long time agos that emanate a similar feeling of distance, B&W pictures in tatty history text books of the first Black children to attend desegregated schools in the US—in our parents lifetimes. In place of a lack of critical knowledge there can be shame, and to quell that, a dismissiveness. Defensiveness. Our intentionally curated histories have a key role to play in that. Ways of recording that have omitted, erased, and silenced.

The absence of archive isn't just about missing photos—it's about missing histories, missing threads, roots that tie us to a network of trees that thrive in spite of the harshest conditions. Fractured or non-existent archives have consequences for communities who are missing collective understandings of our own experiences.

It’s 2025; I still can’t find my father on the internet.

I’ve spent my lifetime trying to logic my way out of illogical things, to reason with absences—if I could just do that one thing (that thing ever changing)—all this would be different. Therapy has taught me otherwise. Life keeps showing me otherwise.

There are some things outside of our control, and there are others we can take control of. I’m figuring the wisdom is in knowing the difference.

My father lives a mile away. What does he look like? Who came before him, and where did we get these eyebrows from?

What could exist there in this negative space?

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