“My homeland Is everywhere”: Samantha Box is redefining contemporary photography

With the CIA plotting to assassinate Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, the United States worked to destabilise the success of the widely popular democratic socialist leader who called out all players in the Cold War on behalf of the Global South. The newly liberated Caribbean nation was rocked by violence and the government destabilised, while American institutions reaped the benefits of a displaced labor force.

In 1982, photographer Samantha Box, then aged five, moved with her family from Kingston, Jamaica, to Edison, New Jersey. “My parents were both chemists; my mother was from Trinidad and my father was a professor at the University of the West Indies and he was recruited by a pharmaceutical company,” says Box. “In the ’80s, the US was actively recruiting scientists from the Global South, places like the Caribbean, India, and China. We were part of a larger wave of migration that fundamentally reshaped central Jersey.”

As the daughter of a Black Jamaican father and Indian Trinidadian mother, Box came of age among a dazzling array of overlapping diasporas and simply could not be contained as her name might suggest. Without existing frameworks, she decided to invent her own, using photography to explore Black queer identity in her first major series, Invisible. The work, made between 2005–2018, chronicles the lives of youth living at Sylvia’s Place, an emergency shelter for unhoused queer youth in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen and the city’s flourishing Kiki scene.

But the proscriptions of documentary photography proved too closely aligned with failed notions of objectivity that lie at the heart of Western cultural hegemony that informs the practice. Feeling confined, Box broke free, turning to still life to create Caribbean Dreams. The ongoing series takes its name from a popular brand of traditional foods from the islands, some of which were extremely hard to find in her youth.

Drawing inspiration from 17th century Dutch masters, who transformed the fruits of colonisation into sumptuous scenes of their newfound wealth, Box maps a web of imperialism across continents and centuries to explore histories of survival that have been gone untold until now. With the exhibition, Confluences, now on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Box brings together both series to explore how our lives are shaped by what we love.

As a Black queer woman of mixed race who left her homeland as a child, Box uses photography to craft new paradigms of identity rooted in lived experience. “My images are made out of fragments that have been put into motion along these routes with the commodification of people and knowledge,” Box says. “The diaspora has been shaped through concepts of value, labor, and desire, and how the Caribbean has been shaped by those forces as a zone of paradise. More than anything else I’m from this global diasporic space; my homeland is everywhere.”

Samantha Box: Confluences is on view through March 25, 2025, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.

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