Abigail Hadeed: A call for T&T’s artists’ archives, museum accountability

This Sunday’s Bookshelf focuses on Trinidad-born and based artist/ photographer Abigail Hadeed, who has been documenting Caribbean cultural traditions, the environment, and our people for over 30 years. Hadeed tells me she is “an outlier at heart, drawn to the overlooked: people on the periphery, mundane objects, flowers long past their bloom”. She is drawn to “taking risks” with her photography, to “stretching to connect with others by sharing my humanity and visual language”.

At 60 (it was her birthday yesterday, November 4), Hadeed can look back on a distinguished career, having represented T&T at the 1998 São Paulo and the 2006 Havana Biennials and having her photography displayed at the permanent collection of LightWork, Syracuse, NY, and The Hood Museum, Dartmouth. In 2020, Hadeed received two honourable mentions for her work in the International Photography Awards (The Island and I Are One) and the Budapest Photography Awards (Still Life Still Lives–Not so Enchanted). In 2021, Cornell University’s Dark Laboratory awarded Hadeed’s ‘Warriors of Huracán’ the first prize in photography.

Hadeed’s work advances concerns about the history of the Caribbean, “a complex story of slavery, migration, mercantilism, trade, transportation, transmigration and alienation”. Hadeed says she “strives to put a face to what history has denied, to interrogate the Caribbean region at the crossroads of an unresolved past and an impending future”. As a storyteller, Hadeed feels a responsibility to photograph our stories from our region’s perspective.

“As children of the early 60s, we were fed a constant diet of the colonial perspective; at the time, it was all I knew. On my return from studying photography at the Art Institute of Ft Lauderdale, I worked at the T&T Mirror. Keith Shepherd, Raynier Maharaj and Raffique Shah exposed me to a Trinidad I found fascinating and like nothing I had experienced. That was my jumping-off point to explore my country and the Caribbean.”

The following excerpt is Hadeed’s statement on her process of taking photographs:

“There is a difference between taking a photograph and making images. I create bodies of work which come from an intuitive place. I take time before making images or creating portraits (which I’m now concentrating on) to research my subjects thoroughly.

“Earning the trust of my subjects does not differ; human beings must feel seen and known to trust in my capacity to capture some truths about their lives. Between the observation and the patience to allow things to unfold, the magic happens.

“My process is like the sea … fluid and surging. My work spans three decades of movement, from Trinidad steelbands, traditional mas and theatre to the indigenous people of Guyana to Caribbean descendants in Central America, from the once outlawed Caribbean spiritual practice of Ifa/Orisha to my ever-evolving photographic response to water.

“These bodies of work, like bodies of water, are restless and ongoing. They change form and location but return to the source. I am that sea, calm but uneasy or swelling with rage, grief and desire. I am that woman gripping a short rope at the back of a boat, camera in hand, trying not to drown, reaching to connect all these elements with my lens, my gaze.

“My current process with digital mediums is similar to when I worked with black-and white film. I compose in the camera and try visualising the image before making it. I use photographic software the same way I would make a print in the darkroom. I dodge, burn and tone my images, only now with a computer. Mostly, I avoid digital manipulation or cropping, preferring to use the entire raw file. I embrace the flexibility of digital photography, especially in the water.

“Speaking to the isolation, forced stillness and closed borders imposed by the COVID- 19 pandemic, I created my series Still Life | Still Lives; Not so Enchanted. I used white borders to mirror yet another experience of confinement, keeping each image separate.

“The black film-like borders around The Warriors of Huracán resemble my black and-white images printed in the darkroom. I filled out my negative carrier to expose the edge of the film, indicating the whole frame. Although I value the digital experience, nothing can match the magic of seeing a film image emerge from the developer. In the darkroom, printing is a subversive experience, much like going underwater. The image develops and surfaces just as I emerge from beneath the waves. There is something transcendent and complete in the solitude and time it takes to create that unique image. I continue to explore ways to apply that darkroom alchemy and sensibility to my digital photographs.

“I’m even more aware now than ever that my negatives, colour transparencies, prints and ephemera cannot continue to be stored as they are. Archives are important and record a time and era of life. Analogue and digital archives require curating, cataloguing, digitising and proper storage. Having worked consistently for nearly four decades, represented T&T at two of the world’s biggest biannuals, Sao Paulo and Havana, and my work collected by major institutions and museums, I would like to be able to take care of this repository of imagery.

“As a society, we must ask ourselves why more attention has yet to be placed on preserving our heritage. It’s always the sole responsibility of artists or historians to find ways of preserving what they have created. Our institutions fall short of that or any accountability for being the custodians of work in the National Museum. Or why is there not an institution for works created over decades of carnival, steel bands, or designers? What are we leaving for the generations to come?”

–End of artist statement.

In 2022, Hadeed was awarded a Mellon grant through its inaugural cohort of Art x Tech Fellows for Digital Junkanoo, the newly funded lab as a part of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL) Mellon Grant for the fall of 2022.

Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023. (www.irasroom.org)