Circa West Indies Image Archive & Book

I have been collecting early photographs, postcards, and glass slides of the Caribbean islands for 20 years. My interest grew from my training and career in graphic design and photography, and eventually expanded to include any printed material relevant to the history of our region. My motivation also evolved into a desire to bring back all of these visual records of our past back home from all corners of the globe for study by historians, authors, artists and for the benefit of the future generations to come. Paper becomes very fragile in the tropics over time, so the task of digital scanning and retouching has been a labor of love and an act of historical preservation. Having done this, I decided to present the collection to the public in the form of an album of sorts.

Formatted as a steamship voyage to Barbados through the West Indies, Circa West Indies is a coffee table book comprised of approximately 360 pages of early photographs taken in various West Indian Islands: Cuba, Jamaica, Martinique, Barbados and Trinidad.

Inside the covers are over 450 photographs, many unique and never before published in a book. Postcards, watercolours, letters and other items of ephemera also tell our story in the pages. This book was compiled to give the modern viewer a glimpse into our recent past. The images inside show people, places and every day life in the islands of the West Indies from the 1860’s to the 1920’s.

This is not a history book, but a visual record by early photographers with excerpts from early travel writers with a contemporary perspective.