Takenya Holness: 'The image is beautiful because the people are beautiful. Them just existing is beautiful.'
The London-based British Jamaican photographer documents life on her homeland island with grace and attentiveness
A glimpse of someone in profile, captured through the open front gate of a green and yellow dwelling. The person, maybe the aunt or the uncle in the title, sits deep inside the shadows. Silhouetted as they are against the light of a back door left ajar, the curve of their head echoes the slightly wider curvature of the twisted filigree metal work out front. The layers of this domestic space — wall then gate then porch then the cool of a darkened interior then the hot day out back — invite you in in a whisper.
“Be respectful,” they say, “this is the quiet of someone’s home.”
I’ve spent the past six months living with Takenya Holness’s work, since Grace sent me a link last autumn. (Grace has also compiled a most excellent Jamaica-themed playlist for you all — see below). It left me with a powerful sense of yearning. Since graduating with a BA in social psychology from Loughborough University and an MA from Central St Martins in contemporary photography, Holness has built up an effervescent commercial practice and a beautiful body of documentary work. She describes it as a “patient study of colour, culture and community”.
On a cold day in January, Holness and I spent a long while speaking over video. We were both in London, but inclement skies and work overwhelm had made meeting in person — we were going to walk and talk around Battersea Park — feel too much. Instead we spent time, from the warmth of our respective homes, voyaging remotely through her practice. Now that I think about it, that feels appropriate. So much of what she does is about reckoning with what “home” means.
Holness was born in Jamaica and brought up in the UK. On her first trip back to the island as an adult, in 2023, she packed her cameras (a medium format Mamiya and a Minolta) and thought she might do a project about fatherlessness. Her own father, with whom she wasn’t close, had died not long before; she found out she had more family than she’d known about. There was a lot to unpack.
But then she arrived, and she fell in love — with the island as a whole. “It was just the everyday moments, the scenes that unfolded in front of me. At that point, it wasn't about a story as such, or anything to do with my father, or the pain or the trauma that I felt. It was just like, wow, this is where I meant to photograph.” She had found her path.
‘Everything becomes so potent in Jamaica: I feel the sun x1000, I hear the music x1000, the richness of conversation and also family.’
It is most certainly the patience — the slow looking — that lends Holness’s work such depth. Whether she trains her lens on boys playing football in their shorts, the ball mid-air, or two uncles peering down a road in the dimming light of day’s end, or her baby cousin chilling with a goat in a laundry basket* while her tired mother gets stuff done out of the frame, you get the sense that Holness is taking it all in. She’s not making herself small. She is stilling her heart. She is seeing it all and feeling it all, each new scene adding a layer of polish to that nugget of understanding we can accrue if we pay attention really closely to where we are.
As a result, the moments she collects are quiet and pregnant —“correct moments”, as Hilton Als recently put it. Als, in an essay about the Bajan painter Frank Walter, writes that, in its ease and openness, each of Walter’s paintings belies the intense focus that birthed it:
“One gets the sense, in looking at Walter’s rivers and sky, that his perspectives were hard-won: he doesn’t just look at a bank and water, he pulls back, rather like a cinematographer—he had a great interest in photography, too—to get at the poetic essence of a scene. This requires aloneness, and silence: you have to listen to your own feet falling as you traverse this or that landscape, looking not for the right moment but for the decisive moment that Henri Cartier-Bresson told us about so long ago and that remains vibrant in Walter’s work. His art is filled with correct moments.”
The first image in Holness’s ongoing A Fly in Jamaica series wasn’t something she’d planned, or even fully understood at the time. Her half-brother, whom she’d only just met, was talking to her when she looked over to see a guy sat on the river bank.
Holness says she has always liked taking photographs of people from behind. She captures them as they look out into the world, their gaze hidden from view, but their view, yours to share. It is an expansive, expectant stance.
“All I saw was his back, and a kind of solitude that was contrasting with the liveliness and chaos of the environment that we were in. Because one thing about Jamaica, it is rarely quiet, it's rarely still. There's always something going on. There's music. There's people. There's vibes, vibes and energy.” She took the shot.
It was only when she returned to London and processed the film that she noticed the play of light and shadow so perfectly fallen on the man’s nape and back. It’s like the sun has sought this unnamed man out, by name. It graces his stillness with an almost melodic gesture as he leans forward over the water, turning his head just slightly to the left. On the bank opposite bathers are stacked on the water’s edge, their contours blurring into the landscape. But that light and the warmth you feel emanating from the image, it rings clear and true.
Of course, returning alone to a place you only knew as a child comes with its challenges. Holness says her mother was very worried about her safety, particularly in Kingston, where crime rates have soared in recent years. This in turn made Holness quite scared. “The next time I go to Jamaica, I actually want to be less fearful,” she says. “I don't know if anyone can see in the images, but there is a lot of fear behind them. That's why a lot of times, I was photographing out of a moving taxi.”
You don’t in fact feel this in the looking. Holness’s description of this raw process is really moving, to be sure, but these tensions she relays — that quickening of the eye — give Holness’s work an assured edge, a certain mettle. The conditions of each shoot are outweighed not just by her technical skill but by an instinctive homing in on small but important moments: the weight of a day, the shape of a real life.
A woman sits on a plastic garden chair on a stoop, the colours of the wall behind her harmonising with the patterns of her dress, the leaves of the trees beyond and the advertising bunting overhead. As Holness takes the shot, the woman’s one foot is lifted just off the ground.
“When you learn to shoot in a studio environment,” says Holness, “you need correct lighting, you need the poses, you need a team, you need all of these things to create an image. But as a documentary photographer, all you need is a moment.” That moment can be informed by light or by the person, by a feeling, by an event, by the environment … “I just try to take as many photos as I can when my body calls me to.”
Leaf through Holness’s work in Jamaica and you’re left with an abiding sense of life lived together, out in the open. Often, she says, she finds London lonely. She’ll get to the end of her working day and wish she could be on a beach talking to someone, or just sit on the doorstep of her house. “In Jamaica, it's a lot more natural for people to just be in their environment and take up that space in such a beautiful way: people will be sitting on the doorstep of their house, and we’ll just talk or listen to music. There’ll be people smoking and drinking, someone'll be playing a Lovers Rock song. You know, you're really immersed in the environment and the culture, and that just doesn't happen here as much.”
In Dwellings, a second ongoing project, Holness is documenting homes and buildings and aims to photograph in all of the island’s 14 parishes. She’s interested in what makes a thing or a structure authentically Caribbean.
She tells me that even before she went back to Jamaica that first time, she realised she’d been kind of looking for the island on London streets — in the details she would choose to pay attention to when shooting in the city: a zinc (corrugated iron) fence; the smell of something burning; a certain kind of light; a palm tree. “Maybe subconsciously I was already preparing for a landscape that wasn’t here,” she says. “I was creating environments that resembled home.”
Last summer, to mark Jamaican Independence Day on 9 August, Holness made a mesmerising series of portraits of her grandmother, Veronica Henry, in Burgess Park, south London — as part of her Yuh From Farin series.
See the softness of the light, the tenderness in Holness’s framing of Henry’s pose. That contained hand gesture, that gaze into the middle distance, solemn yet dreamy. Both recall ancient portraiture, Rogier van der Weyden’s Portrait of a Lady; Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna del Latte.
Another sequence shows Henry with two friends, Yvonne Williams and Sister Jean Abdullie. They’re dressed for Sunday service, in traditional Jamaican Madras wear, and stand in front of the Peckham Seventh Day Adventist Church.
In one image they stand together simply, in a row, holding gently on to each other’s shoulders in a kind of traditional siblings portrait pose. It is the way the young girls that Indian photographer Gauri Gill captured in her remarkable Balika Mela series instinctively chose to stand. People close to each other unconsciously making visible the ties that bind them together.
In another, the women spread out their skirts like dancers. Their folds of checkered red fabric with crisp white lace trim swish in the sunlight. Movement and stillness. To hold and to praise. Again, I’m minded of ancient scenes, the flurry of activity around Anne the matriarch in Pietro Lorenzetti’s The Birth of the Virgin and Anne’s own composure, her dignified repose, a connection underscored by Holness’s caption to the series: “These incredible ladies have nurtured and loved me unconditionally,” Holness wrote. She celebrated “their strength, their grace, and the rich heritage they represent.”
Quite what “home” means is a complex thing. Figuring out where you find yours is a journey, often fraught, particularly if your roots are diasporic.
One of the biggest culture shocks for Holness was reckoning with the altogether slower pace of life on the island, compared to London. “I'm used to efficiency and speed and pleasantness and they just don't care. It's very on their time, you know, they hate you from when you walk into the store even though you haven't done anything.” Her foreignness, her “not being from here”, she says, is evident to everyone she meets in Jamaica.
“But on the flip side,” she says, “I felt like I was able to get more out of the day. I was able to have conversations, to feel the sun. Everything becomes so potent there: I feel the sun x1000, I hear the music x1000, the richness of conversation and also family. I have a lot of family in Jamaica, so to be surrounded by that constantly … because here it's like you have family, but everyone's in their little bubble, it's not your grandma and great grandparents all living together. Whereas in Jamaica, my family, they have this plot of land, and everyone has their houses on it. So you can just walk over to your cousin's house. It solidified for me that this is what I want home to look like. This is what home actually means to me.”
Als, in the above-mentioned essay, describes Frank Walter’s paintings as “an inquiry into the temperature of place”:
the tactile sensation of ground beneath your feet while your head is in the clouds, or imagining clouds from a bird’s perspective, and birds from a cloud’s perspective. That was what I understood that afternoon in Venice, with Walter: he gives more glory and truth than we think we can bear. And then gives some more as we rush to meet it.
Hard-won perspectives. Correct moments. Holness too is taking “the temperature of place”, in this island she’s both rooted in and has only just scratched the surface of.
She has had some people ask, she says, whether she feels she is romanticising life in a place where poverty is rampant and hardship is tangible. To her mind though, she is simply capturing real people living real lives — her people, to whom she has a bone-deep connection. And that’s enough. She hasn’t asked them to do anything, she says: “They're just existing. The image is beautiful because they're beautiful. Them just existing is beautiful.”
Notes
*A few winters ago, I wrote about the Christmas when Hazel, my other mother, came to stay. Tsubamé my daughter was just five months old and I’d still not figured out how to put her down. Don’t come for me. I couldn’t ever handle her crying (the noise). Also, I couldn’t have been happier to have her in my arms. But of course, needs must, and Hazel said, just get a box. She told me she used to put her children, and then her grandchildren, in a laundry basket, while she was hanging clothes up to dry outside. So we filled a Sennheiser speaker box with plushies and stuffed toys and put Tsubamé in there, while, I think, I made us lunch. I can’t even remember. But I feel like I do know exactly how Baby Hardy’s tired mother felt.
World of echo
Thank you to Grace, for these tunes and for bringing Takenya’s work to my attention. Wish we could be listening to this on a doorstep or a beach somewhere.
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Wow! Thank you for such a detailed and rich account of my work and journey 💚
Thank you, Dale, so thoughtful, perceptive and loving, as usual.