Absence as Embodiment

Andrea Chung’s photo series, ‘May Day’ features colonial photographs of Caribbean natives working in the fields. Chung uses photographs containing common tropes of that era — plantation workers in the fields, cropping sugar cane, bunches of bananas, etc. — and removes the bodies from them. Dr. Krista Thompson elaborates on the significance of this work in her article ‘The Evidence of Things Not Photographed’ absent of the bodies to perform tropicality, the narratives change greatly.

View Series here.

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