Still Becoming

This project follows young people in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a place long shaped by outside interest. Through daily life and tradition, the images show joy, pause, and inheritance within a territory whose future is often decided elsewhere.

This project examines how young people in the U.S. Virgin Islands grow up inside a territory shaped by colonial transfer, limited self-determination, and ongoing economic dependence. The islands shifted from Danish to U.S. control without the consent of the people who lived here, creating a political status that remains unresolved. Young Virgin Islanders inherit this condition daily American by citizenship, Caribbean by culture, and still outside full political equity.

The photographs follow moments where identity is learned informally: in public gatherings, shared traditions, and communal spaces passed down through use rather than policy. These are places where young people come to understand what belonging looks like when governance, land ownership, and decision-making power sit elsewhere. Celebration and discipline exist side by side, shaped by both pride and constraint.

Youth appear throughout the series as participants, observers, and inheritors. They move through rituals that carry joy, but also responsibility. They form peer groups, test courage, and learn social codes long before they are asked to define themselves politically. This learning happens in a territory where questions about staying, leaving, and return remain constant. Migration sits close to every childhood. Even those who leave carry what was learned here into other national spaces.

Rather than presenting crisis or spectacle, the project holds attention on continuity. It asks how identity forms when national belonging feels partial, when culture anchors life more securely than government, and when young people must decide how to live within systems they did not choose. The work considers what persists, values, movement, memory when political clarity remains out of reach.

The series ends without resolution, reflecting a shared condition across several territories shaped by colonial exchange. It asks what futures are possible for young people raised inside structures that remain unfinished, and what they will carry forward, wherever they go.