“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 17^th 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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