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The photo I can’t forget As we think back to Carnivals past, and anticipate the festival’s future, three photographers share favourite images from their archives, and tell the stories behind them
M
as, the performance artform at the heart of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, is essentially fleeting: after months of preparation and anticipation, the moment comes with all its energy and passion, colour and fire, and then is gone, leaving traces in our memory — and in photographs. “As the years pass, photographs become our memories of Carnival”: so we wrote back in the January/February 2007 issue of Caribbean Beat, where we asked six noted Carnival photographers to each select a specially meaningful image from their respective archives, and tell us its story. Fourteen years later, in a year when the COVID-19 pandemic means the Carnival season is imbued with nostalgia, we asked three more photographers to do the same thing. Independent of each other, and entirely by coincidence, all three — Jason C. Audain, Maria Nunes, and Shaun Rambaran — chose photographs of moko jumbies, the traditional mas character derived from West Africa which has enjoyed a major revival in the past decade. There’s a story in that, too.
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“A photo is a story” Jason C. Audain remembers photographing Peter Minshall’s Carnival King The Dying Swan — as told to Shelly-Ann Inniss 2016 was my first time photographing the Carnival Kings and Queens competition at the Savannah. I wouldn’t have gotten the photo if it wasn’t for Maria Nunes. I was taking pictures all night, and right before I left I saw Maria and she said, “You can’t leave, The Dying Swan is coming on.” I told her my memory card was full, I couldn’t take any more photos. She pulled out a card and said, “Use that — whenever we meet up again you can give it back.” That’s how I ended up taking photos of Minshall’s Dying Swan [portrayed by Jha-whan Thomas].
