In 2018, the British-Jamaican filmmaker and artist Joseph Douglas Elmhirst discovered an episode of the BBC documentary series Everyman, which premiered in 1977, that followed his grandfather, Reverend David Douglas, a Jamaican Pentecostal pastor living in Watford, as he struggled to find a place to preach. Prior to this, Elmhirst had never even seen a picture of his maternal grandfather and was drawn to the way he combined his faith with political agency. “The first thing my grandfather said in the documentary was a quote by James Baldwin, and that really shocked me as I had assumed he would be much more conservative, and to learn that he was really engaged and actively trying to create political spaces for Caribbean people in the UK was inspiring,” Elmhirst tells Dazed. “I’ve been very lucky to inherit that documentary as a filmmaker.” 

This encounter, he explains, has been foundational to his practice, which is in constant dialogue between the past and the present. His first short film, Mada, for instance, follows three generations of a Jamaican family over three days, and his second, Burnt Milk, is centred on an immigrant in the 1980s who feels alienated in London and has visions of her homeland in Jamaica. His latest project, a publication titled Duppy (co-edited by the academic Jovan Scott Lewis), is an extension of this interest in memory, history and conversing across temporal landscapes. 

Named after the Jamaican term for a ghost or spirit, the publication gathers, among other contributions, speculative correspondences penned by Elmhirst’s mother: Miss Ronnie, an interview between the artist Alvaro Barrington and fashion designer Jawara Alleyne, and conversations with community leaders such as Richard Currie, who advocates for Indigenous rights in Jamaica. These acts of retrieval and seeing history as a site for creation are crucial to Elmhirst, who refers to the book as a series of ghost stories. “I have a passion for history, and I was looking for contributors who, through their work, connect our past to the present. I feel really aligned with this ethos and the desire to subvert a Western idea of what Jamaica or the Caribbean is,” Elmhirst shares. 

The publication’s photographic commissions are similarly an exercise in challenging conceptions of the Caribbean by deliberately weaving together temporalities. In the series A Hidden Man, Jamaican-based artists Danielle Myers and Kadeem Rodgers pay homage to the paintings of Trinidadian artist Boscoe Holder, whose depictions of male bodies in semi-homoerotic states were rarely exhibited. “They felt that there would be something really wonderful about recreating the paintings in a modern context to counteract some of the conservative notions that led to them being hidden away”, Elmhirst explains.

Elsewhere, photographer and filmmaker Luca Khouri’s What Remains turns towards the relationship between people and land. Backdropped by the Jamaican landscape, the languid photographs depict women moving through sites of personal and collective memory. The series, which includes portraits of trans women, also continues Khouri’s long-standing commitment to documenting trans communities often excluded from dominant representations of Jamaica.

For the artist, Duppy is an attempt to reclaim the tactile forms of cultural production that underpinned intellectual life in the Caribbean and its diaspora. While researching the publication and with the help of his co-editor, he spent time looking through the archives of newspapers and journals such as the Brixton-based West Indian Gazette and Savacou, which brought politics, music and art together. “There was so much dialogue happening in print, but over the last thirty years we’ve moved away from the medium,” he says. “In a country that has such a complex history as Jamaica, but so little recorded history, it feels really important to create something tangible.”

That sense of materiality runs throughout the book. Designed by Bryce Carrington, Duppy’s hand-drawn typography and illustrations reference nzu chalk, used in spiritual practices across Nigeria and the Caribbean, while the publication’s newsprint format asks the reader to take extra efforts to preserve the book. “I wanted the fragility of the newsprint to reflect the fragility of preservation in that region,” he says. The material nature of Duppy was doubly crucial to Elmhirst, who had spent most of his professional life in filmmaking. “I admired the physical relationship my friends who are painters and sculptors have with their work”, he recounts. “You can’t hold images on a screen, and I didn’t realise how emotional I would find it, to be able to finally hold something I created in my hands”.

DUPPY is now available for pre-order here: It will also be available through the following stockists: National Gallery of Jamaica (Jamaica), Black Cultural Archives (London), ALÁRA (Lagos), Librairie 1909 (Paris), and Fiend (Melbourne).