Locals only: intimate portraits from Amber Pinkerton in Jamaica

This week marks five years since the launch of Dazed Beauty! Over the next five days we will be celebrating this anniversary by bringing you big celebrity interviews, cultural deep dives into the weird and wonderful trends of today, and going back through the archives to resurface some of our favourite pieces.

To quote our co-founder Bunny Kinney in his original editor’s letter, Dazed Beauty is: “a space for us to document, deconstruct and experiment with beauty in all its forms, in every dimension, and tell the stories of the lived experience each one of us has in our own individual bodies as we navigate the world, both online and off.” We hope we’ve remained true to our promise and will continue to be challenging, anti-establishment, diverse and exciting. Thank you for being part of our journey.

Welcome to Rooted, a campaign celebrating the power of black hair and the launch of ‘Tallawah’ – an exhibition by photographer Nadine Ijewere and hairstylist Jawara Wauchope. Here, we explore what the beauty of black hair is all over the globe, from Jamaica to London and New York to the screens of Nollywood films. 

“The beauty of Jamaica lies within it’s slow-paced, laidback nature,” says photographer Amber Pinkerton who shot a series of intimate close-up portraits of people in her hometown of Kingston for Dazed Beauty. “We Jamaicans live in our own little bubble of perceptions, problems, and jokes. It sometimes feels like a fantasy world where everything isn’t as serious, and you need a dose of that every now and then.”

Pinkerton’s photography always documents the simple, everyday beauty of life and the communities that reside within it, but for this project, she says, it was particularly important to her to capture true depictions of what is really on the streets day-to-day. 

To achieve this Pinkerton hung around public areas like Devon House, Hope Gardens, Manor Park, and Half Way Tree, finding the small everyday details of people – the hair, the tattoos, the nails, the piercings – that add up to make us who we are and that are at the same time both commonplace and extraordinary. “There is so much function and purpose in the way we style our hair— it has never been random. It makes a clear statement about who you are” she says.

The results are intimate images that are suffused with warmth and humanity. Snapshots that offer a look into the lives of Pinkerton’s subjects but also into the wider, specifically black, culture of Jamaica. “I like to look at the photograph as evidence, and to me, these images are culture-defining,” she says. “To us, it may seem normalised because we are so accustomed to seeing these styles or types of body art in our communities, but in an international context these things truly define us and you realise how different they are to the external world. I hope people realise and treasure that.”

This article was originally published 21 January 2020.