I think it's true that we all feel a little bit displaced, all 6 billion of us modern humans, going about our daily routines trying to ignore that sense of rootlessness that nags us from somewhere deep within. We awake each morning with the most tender parts of our memory exposed, things we barely remember (personally and collectively) flickering before our eyes like film in a broken projector. Where have we come from? Are the lives we have made for ourselves little more than shoebox dioramas? Where do we truly belong?

I have always thought, almost certainly naively, that I am a man freed from the trappings of national identity. I grew up on the island of St. John in the former Danish West Indies, a colony referred to as the United States Virgin Islands since 1917. Nevermind that the United States keeps no colonies. I grew up in a single parent household with my New Jersey-born mother, isolated in the deep green world of the bayforest, a world filled with tin-roof rainstorms and the ebullience of tree frogs. My father, a lifelong Virgin Islander like myself, had moved across the channel to the neighboring, more cosmopolitan island of St. Thomas to live with his new wife in the greathouse of an old Danish sugar plantation she had recently inherited. While my visits to their home were steeped in a deep Caribbean-colonial experience, an oddity in a post-colonial world, my life on St. John was decidedly modern. In private school I was educated almost exclusively by recent American transplants, and like many Caribbean people before me I attended 2 years of middle school and 1 year of high school on the “mainland” United States. Meanwhile the Virgin Islands real-estate boom was occurring, changing the face of the islands, particularly St. John. By the time I returned to be a part of the first high-school graduating class in the island's history, less than half of my fellow students were native Virgin Islanders.

That word, “native”, is loaded. I am certainly not “Native” West Indian, and have never attempted to appropriate the proud Afro-Caribbean heritage as my own; that would be a deep lie. What is true, is that I am from the West Indies, and the Caribbean experience belongs as much to me as anyone. When I discovered the works of the great Caribbean writers, like V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, everything suddenly fell into place. It's the works of these artists that have influenced me, both artistically and in my personal life, more than anything else. I can only hope that my own world view comes across in some of the work you'll encounter on this site, and that I can contribute to the rich Caribbean tradition in my own post-national way. Much of the photography on display here was taken as aesthetic exercise, disconnected from the themes of exile and displacement that the great Caribbean artists explore, but, in some of it, I hope the viewer will find something that speaks to the universality of feeling transplanted: that ultimate paradox of being wholly together in the isolation of our experiences. Being displaced, I believe, can be liberating.