Together Apart

Photographer Robert Taylor offers a series of fleeting reflections on some of the exquisite paradoxes that characterise the connections between Africa and the Caribbean.

“I am Caribbean heritage man, born in England to working-class Jamaican parents. I was inspired to become a photographer by the British-based Nigerian artist, Rotimi Fani Kayode. These ties have rendered me intrigued, from a considerable physical distance, by both Africa and the Caribbean.

I’m inspired and bewildered by the bizarre, complicated network of paths and walls, blockages and channels that sometimes and in some ways connect – and disconnect – Africa and the Caribbean. Their ingredient peoples and identities – recklessly concocted, contorted, ruthlessly exploited, and then left to dance in the wind – have been ripe for plunder by actors of all stripes, from within and beyond.

Working as a photographer in Africa made another connection for me… between what I know and what I don’t know. My very personal collection of stereotypes of Africa and Africans have been confirmed and confounded in roughly equal measure.

Acts of transmission, of memory, exist and can become Threads of connection that adorn, bind and choke; I find myself in Deep Waters that transport, support and drown, in echo of an Atlantic that endures, harbours and divides.”

In the early 1980s, this Jamaican couple set off for a new life in Zimbabwe, inspired by the prospect of a vibrant liberated African state, led by Robert Mugabe and ZANU PF. When I met them in 2006, they still spoke with fondness for those original ideals that drew them there at a difficult time in their lives in the UK.

The sea, boats and their freight have made an essential connection between Africa and the Caribbean in the best and worst ways imaginable.

© Robert Taylor

Robert Taylor

Robert Taylor came to photography in the late 1980s via the British Royal Air Force, the English Bar and publishing in Nigeria.