“An ever-changing sense of belonging”… This is what binds Jeano Edwards, 30, to Jamaica. A native of Saint-Thomas, in the southeast of the island, he left his native land at the age of 16 to settle with his family in the Hudson Valley, near New York. But he never gave up this “deep love, sometimes tinged with nostalgia”, which binds him to her.
Since 2018, he has returned there every summer, as the photographer he had become. At first it was like a “annual exercise” he had to: create images for define different ways of examining [s]on identity and to dissect this very complex cultural aesthetic”.
The idea of bringing them together in a book quickly emerged. Thus was born EverWonderfulfirst self-published with its own layout, quickly out of print and then reissued (in 2021). “It’s a narrative experience that I want to engage readers in, with the hope that this book will be a piece of ‘home’ for anyone who owns a copy.” says the photographer, who today navigates between Brooklyn and Paris. Its title was inspired by the chant Be Ever Wonderful (1959), by American bluesman Ted Taylor.
intimate connection
EverWonderful, “always wonderful”, these words are enough to sum up his affection for Jamaica. The feeling of exile? It is for him, “to feel very connected to a place, while sensing the fleetingness of this connection and the need to hold it firmly: this is why so many of my works are based in Jamaica. A way to strengthen my relationship with my country of origin, while exploring all the tones that this distance generates”.
If he had stayed there? No doubt he would never have embarked on a career as a photographer, he admits it. “It is this experience of duplication lived during my formative years that allowed me to do what I do today. »
Dedicated to his mother, to whom he had never dared to show his work before publication, this book unfolds like the diary of a tender nostalgia; the attempt, too, to resist any exotic inclination. “My goal was to create a more nuanced aesthetic than the usual clichés of my island,” he explains.
Identity in the making
So every picture says “just enough, nothing more”. The flight of cormorants, the harsh line of a barbed wire, a plunge, a bank, a waterfall, a few grains of sand at the drop of the kidneys, the scents of honey, the exuberance of bougainvillea and the rust on a banana leaf … This gentle continuous flow is studded with faces, sometimes misty looks, happy bodies in the languor of the beaches.
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