Photography On the Brink of Disaster

“Coral & Ash” opened to the New York University community and almost 200 RSVP’d guests on April 25. *Photo credit to Manuel Molina Martagón unless otherwise stated.*

When a strong wind blows through the lush, earthen bush of an island in the Caribbean, exposing the whitened undersides of broad-leafed plants like the heart-shaped dasheen, elders say that it’s about to rain.

The leaves, when upturned in anticipation of the impending rainfall, represent something about to happen, a kernel of Indigenous knowledge passed down through generations of Caribbean people turned metaphor in the everyday.

Such is the scene that Vincentian visual artist Nadia Huggins encountered while documenting environmental differences in the wilderness of Greiggs, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and the sentiment encapsulated in the central image of her latest solo exhibition, “Coral & Ash,” in New York City.

The main wall of the exhibition features work from Huggins’ “Transformations,” “Circa no future” and coral surveys.

“That's really something that I find is important for me to relate in my work,” Huggins said of the sense of prescience the leaves project. “It's like, ‘How do I translate this idea of film sequence into an image? What is that moment – the essential moment – that really tells that story of when something shifts, when there's a change in the environment?’”

The image of overturned dasheen leaves, from Huggins’ ongoing body of work, “Bush,” adds a pop of green to an otherwise blue-and-gray-toned exhibition, separating two sides of art photography that cover the two-story walls of New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s atrium in Washington Square. The exhibition, presented by NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, opened last month and runs until Dec. 20.

Agency That Lives and Breathes

Having grown up in St. Vincent and lived in St. Lucia, the Trinidad-born, conceptual and documentary photographer considers herself Caribbean in an expansive sense. She endeavors in the show not to represent the Antilles but to paint a holistic picture of the region from the inside out to tell viewers that what they see “belongs to us,” she said.

“Coral & Ash” showcases work peppered with “visual signifiers,” like coconut trees, breeze blocks and shared body language, meant to remind any Caribbean viewer of home. Images from Huggins’ 2014 “Circa no future” climb the KJCC’s walls as they chronicle the erosion of Black Vincentian boys’ performances of masculinity during their familiar activity of diving beneath the sea’s surface.

Lead curator Dantaé Elliott, a PhD candidate in NYU’s Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature department, speaks with guests in front of the main exhibition wall during the “Coral & Ash” opening.

The gradual degradation of a coral reef, represented by the vivid turquoise pictures speckled with pinks and oranges of the Caribbean Sea from her coral surveys and acclaimed body of diptychs “Transformations,” cover the wall to the right of the overturned dasheen. To the left, the grand, billowing plumes of grays and dry-earth browns of the ashfall following the 2021 eruption of the La Soufrière volcano in St. Vincent, documented and compiled into Huggins’ “The Beginning is the End and the End is the Beginning,” draw onlookers’ eyes.

Through the perspective of her images, the exhibition becomes at-once an ecological archive and an almanac of Caribbean people as they exist in their space, a point-of-view often omitted in traditional imagery of the Caribbean.

“Nadia's work refuses what I've called the ‘photographic capture’ of places and subjects that conform to the visual regimes of empire and tourism,” exhibition curator and Hemispheric Institute Director Dr. Ana Dopico said. “They affirm relation, intimacy, interiority, complicated memory, and experience. The images are not made to please, though they are stunning, they are made, it seems to me, to reveal a deep political relation to place, to self, to race, to climate.”

Hemispheric Institute Director and NYU Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese Ana Dopico speaks during the opening reception.

And they do.

Images of coral throughout the exhibition are tagged with coordinates of their approximate location, a call back to Huggins’ nine years of documenting the changes in the reefs. But the identifiers also became crucial when the wealthy investors behind the La Vue Hotel & Beach Club proposed to remove a living reef in St. Vincent’s Indian Bay, import additional sand for the beach and install an artificial reef in its place near the shoreline in 2021.

Huggins used the labeled images as evidence that the reef, presumed dead in the developer’s environmental assessment, was still alive. She built an online campaign displaying the coral at various stages in proper coloring, galvanizing her community to write letters of disapproval to the country’s planning board and helping to bring the development’s promise of upheaval to a halt.

“There's a kind of environmental prejudice that happens beyond just people; it expands as well to these multi species [of marine organisms], ultimately,” Huggins said of the ways imagery of the Caribbean invisibilizes those living in the region, adding, “Unless something is aesthetically pleasing to people, they don't quite understand it has a role in the environment.”

“Coral & Ash” presents Huggins conceptual and documentary photography spanning the last nine years, connected in theme by the images’ relationships to the environmental composition and destruction of the Caribbean island. Photo credit: Nadia Huggins.

The photos of ash-covered leaves and thick plumes of smoke in the wake of La Soufrière’s eruption in northern St. Vincent also serve a political purpose, monitoring the explosion’s impact on the natural environment.

Huggins documented the fallout on the island, which was split into green, yellow and red zones based on the severity of the damage, intentionally excluding people from her shoots to subvert the photography that often exploits those affected by climate disaster.

Though the green zone in the southern part of the island where Huggins lives has almost completely recovered from the explosion, the Indigenous Garifuna and Kalinago communities in the north’s red zones are still navigating the impacts of the ashfall, facing displacement, changes to their river routes and a loss of access to the rest of the island when the Rabbaca River floods during the rainy season.

In the process of creating the body of work now known as “The Beginning is the End and the End is the Beginning,” Huggins isolated her scope to her zone — opting instead to develop programs to help people in the north document their experiences — because she felt they weren’t hers to relate.

Visitors mingle on the first floor of the KJCC during the April 25 reception.

Attendees gather around the KJCC’s atrium as the speakers kick off the event.

Her images propose a “kind of subtle insertion of agency that lives and breathes around our space,” according to lead curator of “Coral & Ash” Dantaé Elliott, who is Jamaican.

“She and the other people that are in the images know what's going on in and around the water there, or in the landscapes as it's changing, and they're learning to live with these changes as they’re happening because they’re evolving with it,” she said, speaking broadly of Huggins’ artwork.

The Art of Catastrophe

The exhibition was born from a guest lecture Huggins did on the La Soufrière eruption in 2021 — per Ph.D. student Elliott’s recommendation — in Dopico’s NYU seminar “Huracán,” which interrogated the hurricane and other environmental disasters’ impact on the Caribbean and the ways its people evolved with the catastrophes.

The course drew on the late Bajan cultural theorist, poet and former NYU professor Kamau Brathwaite’s assertion that “art must come out of catastrophe,” inspiring Huggins to merge, for the first time, her latest work documenting the eruption and previous work capturing environmental issues during the class, Elliott said.

Vinyl prints of work from Huggins’ “Circa no Future” cover three windows of the KJCC’s atrium.

Huggins speaks with a guest during the exhibition’s opening reception.

Shortly after the lecture, Elliott successfully recommended Huggins for the Hemispheric Institute’s Mellon Foundation-funded artist residency. Over the next two years, they developed the concept that became “Coral & Ash” through conversations centering their experiences as people from similar environments plagued by similar disasters.

“I always felt that I had never seen the Jamaica or the Caribbean that I knew when I was growing up. So I've always had that sensation of, ‘Okay, everything that I see about the space that I interact with comes from a gaze that's not what I connect with,” Elliott said of her reasons for admiring Huggins’ work.

“But especially with “Circa no future” and the other images…she is documenting a life that a lot of Caribbean people can connect with because it could be anywhere in the Caribbean,” she added.

Spoken-word poet Yaissa Jiménez performed a piece from her new poetry series, “Poemas de Protección.”

“Coral & Ash” invites viewers from other parts of the world to meditate on and deepen their knowledge of the region and its history, too. It creates an intentionally immersive experience enhanced by the transformation of an adjoining conference room into a reflective space where videos of Huggins’ nature walks and regular swims loop.

Its April 25 opening reception saw an expansive audience of NYU community members and nearly 200 RSVP’d guests, welcomed by what Elliot called the “ancestral power” brought forth in Afro-Dominican poet Yaissa Jiménez’s provocative performance of “Poemas de Protección” (Protection Poems) at the start of the event.

“[The reception] was great because a lot of different people from the diaspora came out — so from Trinidad and Tobago, St. Vincent, Haiti to Jamaica — so I still felt like I had a bit of a Caribbean community there,” Huggins said. “And people really connected to the work, even people who weren't necessarily from the Caribbean.

“I think it gave them an access point into the region to see us in a different way, and I think that was really, really, really special,” she continued, reflecting on the event and the exhibition from her home in Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Clad in navy-blue, Huggins sat just off center, sipping tea from a vermilion mug labeled “hotter” in front of a wall littered with artwork blurred by her background filter.

Huggins welcomes the attendees and introduces the exhibition during the “Coral & Ash” opening reception.

She explained that the exhibition was the first time she’d ever been able to synthesize her work, especially that of the last four years, through an ecological theme. The show breaks down the perceived dichotomy between coral and ash — sea and land — instead offering a pointed reflection on their roles in the very fabric of the environment.

“Coral broken down turns into white sand, and ash is ultimately black sand,” she said. Both are geological formations that make up the island.

True, too, is that Black, Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous people in the Caribbean compose the island themselves, as evidenced through Huggins’ work. They live and evolve with the island, and the land lives and evolves with its people. Both tell fraught, yet sentimental stories of a cherished home residing on the brink of disaster amidst the rapidly progressing climate crisis.

With her recent trove of global acclaim, Huggins aims to direct her increased access to once-rare resources toward her calling: making work in and about the Caribbean to develop the photographic practice of the region and build communities to sustain it.

“I feel connected to this. I know it's important, not just from a personal point of view,” she said. “I feel a deep sense of responsibility to make images about here. It doesn’t necessarily have to be specifically about [St. Vincent and the Grenadines], but I've already kind of developed a language — a visual language — from the images that I'm encountering here.”

Nadia Huggins is one of Digital Junkanoo’s inaugural Art x Tech Fellows for 2022-23. To learn more about her work and practice, visit nadiahuggins.com. For more information about how to view the “Coral & Ash” exhibition, which is free and open to the public, head to the Hemispheric Institute’s website.