Untitled (Boy and brown truck) from "Tobago, West Indies"

Carol Fisher

Between 1982 and 1984 Carol Fisher visited Tobago to capture the daily lives of the people of the West Indies. She carried a Polaroid SX-70 and a Hasselblad, getting to know locals in the various places she lived before asking permission to take their portraits. At the time, the 26 x 7 mile island had a population about about 36,000, the main languages being Hindi and English. Though the island is part of the Caribbean, Fisher noted that the social atmosphere was, at the time, more akin to West Africa.

In these images of Tobago Fisher captures people at play, at work, in seriousness, and in laughter in one of the world's most contested regions of colonization and trade. Here, a sombre boy clutching a canvas backpack stands before a truck painted industrial borwn, a blue sky above him. Fisher's work disspells the monolithic ideology circulated by early European and North American anthropologists and allows her subjects to simply be human.

Fisher's background in photography took her all over the world, particularly Asia. Following her time in the West Indies she would travel throughout Vietnam, China, Japan, and Laos, before eventually returning to the U.S. and settlng in New Mexico, where she continues to live and work today.