Hellshire Beach Towel with Flies

2013

Deana Lawson’s work straddles the staged and the spontaneous, often conflating the ways one perceives the fictions and realities that are contained within a still image. For this piece, the artist was photographing a woman at a beach shack outside Portmore, Jamaica, when her subject suddenly left the frame. Lawson captured the imprint the subject’s body left in the crumpled pink towel and the scarlet recliner, around which several flies lingered. This impromptu depiction of the body through its absence suggests the complexities of representation and the ways diaspora is embodied and experienced in the Caribbean.