I am simply enthralled by the new photographic series by Nadia Huggins, “Circa no future.”  Huggins, from the island of Saint Vincent, is a digital photographer and creative director/co-founder of ARC magazine [see interview in our previous post ARC’s Holly Bynoe and Nadia Huggins: A Brief Interview with Repeating Islands]. These recent photos of the sea and teenage boys swimming in Indian Bay, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, have a healing quality about them, perhaps because, as the photographer explains, they capture the “free, fearless,” quality of their interaction with nature and one other; or perhaps because they encapsulate and echo memories of the Caribbean childhoods that many of us experienced (and may still be enjoying). Here are excerpts from the artist’s commentary on “Circa no future.” Please see more about her work in the link below:

Nadia Huggins on “Circa no future”: Circa no future explores fearlessness and the present moment. Since moving back to St Vincent in 2013, I’d wanted to work with boys on the island, to find ways to document their positive experiences through images. I was fascinated by the interaction between these teenage boys, away from adult supervision. There is a sense of camaraderie when they swim out and explore the sea together.

I started recognizing myself in these boys, jumping off boats, and the two rock islands off the beach I grew up on. I spent a lot of my adolescence jumping off of these islands too, so I felt an instant connection to their experience. I was particularly interested in documenting the form of their bodies underwater, and again when they are climbing back up onto the rock. In these moments, they are less aware of the camera.

I believe there has been a lack of positive representation of the black male body in the Caribbean Sea. I wanted to create a body of work to play a part in shifting this dynamic. [. . .]

For more on the artist’s work, see http://nadiahuggins.com/Circa-no-future and http://nadiahuggins.com/

Follow her on Instagram: http://instagram.com/nadiahuggins