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Still Life | Still Lives

My current work looks at the quarantine of 300 Trinidad and Tobago nationals trapped by COVID-19 aboard the cruise ship Enchantment of the Seas. My photographs respond to how deeply the imposed isolation has affected the cruise ship workers on this vessel, and by extension, how the pandemic continues to redefine our very way of life.

Still Life | Still Lives is a play on words I started considering during my own isolation, simultaneous with global mandatory lockdowns. I began this new series by photographing objects of past and personal significance, and then Enchantment of the Seas arrived in our waters, floating without destination on the mercurial sea. This unprecedented situation seemed so symbolic—as if we are, as nations and individuals both, that ship in uncharted terrain, without safe harbor, without protection, left to fend for ourselves within a torrid ocean of uncertainty.

We are currently in a perfect storm—the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, lockdown, the stubborn racial divide. There was an actual tropical storm the day I photographed the cruise ship—everything spinning together with the turbulence of the sea, the blinding rain and gale-force winds, me way out in the ocean almost swallowed by the experience, and the captive cruise ship workers in their despair, and beyond… the world reeling and in chaos.

Regardless of coronavirus and its effects, and the personal and shared states of turmoil and uncertainty, this is Still Life. In spite of everything, life, like the ocean, goes on in its unfathomable mystery.

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The use of extreme and disjointed angles in this series continues to explore my full-on confrontation of my own mixed emotions and feelings of insecurity and safety, not just from the raging sea but from the freefall of the economy, to the uncertainty of life and all the weight that comes with this pandemic.
I intentionally photographed most of the images in this series in sections, as I felt and believed the handling of the pandemic by the world leaders has been disjointed and incohesive.
I got into the sea to shoot the ship, as I wanted to capture the feeling of the current and the waves as the ship floated on the mercurial sea. This image also tries to represent the movement for change taking place globally due to the Black Lives Matter movement.
In this disjointed image, the head of the ship is disconnected from its tail – similar to countries like the United States, which left its individual states to fend for themselves. To me, this image represents a lack of connection between the world’s leaders in the handling of and ability to coordinate a cohesive response to dealing with and caring for the world’s people, and the resulting catastrophic effect on global economies.
I think that, after being on the sea for what seemed like hours, trying to keep our small vessel from sinking, this was the first sight of land we saw as the storm subsided.
Blinding rain and gale-force winds tossed our small pirogue around in the water. We went from not being able to see the ship at all through the curtains of rain, to its mysterious appearance out of nowhere. It reminded me of how, like a phantom, COVID-19 mysteriously appeared, to change the world forever.
Three fearless women fighting to keep our boat from capsizing, using the throttle and protecting ourselves by the amidships from the full force of the storm. In this image, you see the wake and the waves from the boat and sea.
I see this image as symbolic of the overall experience not only of the workers stuck in confinement in small cabins without fresh air, but also how the global movement for change literally blew its stack and burst onto the streets worldwide.
The Royal Caribbean advertisements for this cruise ship are nothing like what I saw and photographed. The ship had the look and feel of something out of a horror movie. The distorted perspective of the ship is the feeling I have had for a long while about what the Coronavirus has brought to the world. It mirrors the new abnormal reality we are now having to readjust to and live with.
The workers came to our rescue after hearing our mayday call several times on channel 16. We never expected that we would actually see anyone from the ship – at the time we were hoping to be rescued by our coast guard. All of a sudden, a small opening appeared on the port side of the ship, and there were about ten workers standing there, looking at us like we were crazy.
The Gulf of Paria is the body of water that separates Trinidad from Venezuela. The ship is there, some four miles off the coast. This body of water must feel like the abyss for the workers stuck at sea, and the many refugees trying to reach Trinidad to escape the hardship of Venezuela.