Descendants of Summer

“Descendants of Summer” is a documentary photography project rooted in my experience as a Bermudian artist seeking to understand how identity, memory and colonial legacy shape life on a 21-square-mile island. Bermuda is often reduced to a postcard image, yet beneath its surface lie stories carried in limestone, family lineages and landscapes marked by generations of survival and transformation. The project’s title references Bermuda’s early colonial name - the Summer Isles - invoking both the warmth of home and the shadows of empire. As the first British colony to implement slavery in 1616, Bermuda still bears the imprint of this history in its social fabric and the lived realities of descendants whose ancestors were forcibly displaced. My work aims to look beyond the clichés of paradise to reveal the deeper truths held in a place small enough for history to feel intimate, yet expansive enough to speak to the broader Atlantic world. Through a series of portraits, landscapes, archival interventions and oral histories, I am building a visual narrative that collaborates with elders, historians and community organisations to reclaim and preserve stories often marginalised or softened in public memory - weaving together contemporary imagery with historical fragments, offering a reflective space to consider resilience, identity and the long reach of colonialism. “Descendants of Summer” is ultimately an act of care for the community that raised me - an effort to honour both the beauty and complexity of belonging to a place shaped by resistance as much as oppression, and to imagine pathways forward through remembrance and dialogue.