This photographer visited South Carolina – an area steeped in a history of slavery – to explore the identity of its black and white people
In the summer of 2015, the state of South Carolina – Donald Trump’s latest Republican victory in the presidential primary elections – was thrown onto the world stage as news of the Charleston church massacre at the hands of a self-proclaimed white supremacist coincided with intensified debates surrounding the region’s continued flying of the Confederate flag – once a symbol of pro-slavery. Seeking to go beyond the headlines, that same summer, documentary photographer and London College of Communications graduate Ryan O’Toole Collett arrived on the South Carolinian island of St. Helena – a place steeped in a history of slavery – with a series in mind that would eventually be called Landspeaks: Visions of St. Helena.
Capturing the identity of a place or community beyond one’s own is no mean feat. So when born and bred Londoner Collett chose the subtropical region as his subject he was facing a mammoth challenge. “South Carolina has had a huge impact on American identity”, he explains. “The Civil War started there, and St. Helena Island was one of the first places where slaves were freed in 1861.” Not long after, the island established The Penn Center, one of the first schools in the United States to educate emancipated slaves. Today, descendants of enslaved Africans make up a large percentage of the island’s population, principally split between white and black Americans. As Collett observes, following emancipation, “grants of land were allocated to the families who had previously been forced to work on the island and its cotton fields (…) Many of their descendants still own, live and work on that land.”
“With each generation’s interpretation of the history passed down to it, both by the memories and historical markers in the landscape and in the minds of the people that live on it, the identity of a place slowly changes and I was interested in that idea” – Ryan O’Toole Collett
Given the “symbiotic and ever-changing” relationship between the land and its people, Collett had originally planned to cast light on how this affects the development of community identity. “With each generation’s interpretation of the history passed down to it, both by the memories and historical markers in the landscape and in the minds of the people that live on it, the identity of a place slowly changes and I was interested in that idea.” However, once he began meeting a cross section of both black and white locals “with remarkably different stories to tell”, he realised the project might be better off without such defined parameters. “Visually I became more interested in trying to represent the place as it felt to me, and my experience of it, rather than try and make assumptions or assertions about somewhere that I did not know or understand.” The result of Collett’s two-month endeavour is a sensitive and open-ended portrayal of St. Helena and its residents – shot on both colour and black-and-white negative film – to intimate its heavy cloud of history, as it simultaneously suggests a narrative of forward-looking hope.
See more from Collett here. This series is dedicated to Keanu: “(He) showed me round the hood and was killed on Dec 16 2015 at 23-years-old. We chilled pretty much every day while I was there and he was a great host"
