THE PASSING OF A MATRIARCH

This project is about how Caribbean diaspora communities carry mourning traditions across water, adapting rituals to new geographies while using them to hold together what displacement tries to pull apart.

A year before she died, my grandmother asked me to photograph her funeral.

She was 101 years old and she understood, with precision, what photographs do. She had watched community memory disappear when unrecorded. She wanted a witness — not a mourner with a camera, but a photographer with a purpose. I honored the commission.

The Passing of a Matriarch documents the full arc of a Caribbean funeral in St. Vincent and the Grenadines: the body in the room where she lived, family gathering in the spaces grief and memory occupy simultaneously, the procession, the burial, the weight of being the person behind the camera when the person in the casket is your own. Shot in large-format black and white, the series refuses spectacle. These images exist because I was trusted inside the room.

The series has since expanded into a larger inquiry: how Caribbean diaspora communities carry mourning traditions across water, adapting rituals to new geographies while using them to hold together what displacement tries to pull apart. Nine-night vigils in Flatbush apartments. Rum poured for the dead in Crown Heights. Photographs of the deceased on mantles wrapped in plastic flowers. What began as a commission from a dying woman became the most important work of my life — and a portrait of how a people refuses to let its dead disappear

Currently exhibited in Atlanta Photography Group's Family Diary 2026.