From the series Lost Resort.  

At the age of 15, my family moved from Guyana to live in Jamaica and I had was immediately transfixed by the island’s north coast, famous for its white sand beaches, pristine waters and thriving hotel industry.

The mythos and aesthetic of Jamaican tropicality that sustains the island’s status as a popular tourist destination, however, comes at a tremendous cost. The vast majority of Jamaica’s renowned beaches are private property. The numerous all-inclusive resorts provide some degree of employment within their self-contained compounds but they stifle local business and over-consume natural resources. Meanwhile, high crime rates driven by desperate poverty continuously threaten the tourism industry islandwide. 

This series, shot between 2018 and 2023 in and around Ocho Rios, uses visual ethnography to explore the experience of place-memory. Each image is an engagement with the Ocho Rios I adored in my youth in the 1990s, exploring my romantic attachment to this place as I came to know it, even as that place slowly disappears.