Untitled (man on porch) from "Tobago, West Indies" by Carol Fisher

Untitled (man on porch) from Tobago, West Indies by Carol Fisher

Untitled (man on porch) from "Tobago, West Indies"

Carol Fisher

Title

Untitled (man on porch) from "Tobago, West Indies"

 
Artist

Carol Fisher

  1941 - PRESENT (biography)
Year
1983 / printed 1984 
Technique
photography 
Image Size
10 1/2 x 10 1/2" image size 
Signature
signed on the mat, verso 
Edition Size
 
Annotations
dated, addressed, and titled "Untitled, Tobago" on mat, verso 
Reference
 
Paper
 
State
 
Publisher
artist 
Inventory ID
FISH119 
Price
SOLD
Description

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 young man in sunglasses smiles at the viewer from a front porch, the doorway behind him draped in pink lace. 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.