Belmont is a tight-knit urban village in East Port-of-Spain known for its carnival mas-making and prowess in steel pan music. The place is also subjected to policing by security forces in response to insecurity and communal conflicts. For some who cannot claim a job, a “reputable” family name, or an education at a prestigious secondary school, they can claim street corners and wall tops. Communities defined by social grids of family networks can also be defined by territory with borderlines. Yet, in the transient evening hour at twilight, I discern the potential for understanding Caribbean society and its mutable meanings of marginality and manhood.
Marlon James’s 2022 photography series, Man Up , first exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica, offers compelling visual commentary on postcolonial Black masculinities. Through dark silhouettes and out-of-focus images that obscure Black male bodies in yards, James evokes a familiar urban trope in contemporary Caribbean aesthetics. James, a Jamaican photographer, based in Trinidad and Tobago, offers a Caribbeanist lens through which to examine the visual economies of these distinct yet interconnected islands. His work illuminates the production of space and gender identities in urban settings.
This series invites viewers to “hold a medz[1]” on Caribbean masculinities vis-à-vis male bonding and intimacies. Reflecting on my own upbringing in a boys’ secondary school in the Caribbean, we maintained an invisible thirty-centimeter distance between us on benches when we sat together—the ruler of heteronormativity. With this context, I take up James’s work to evaluate the spatial logics, the way that “political and gender hierarchies[…]are embedded in postcolonial representation”[2].We swore we were best friends, yet had to uphold a physical distance wide enough to sustain the perception of being “straight.” Heterosexuality was not merely an orientation of sexual preference and desire, it was a culture, rules and rulers governing our school and society at large.
“Medz” (2022), a striking image that opens the series, employs a shallow depth of field to render the central male sitter in a state of visual ambiguity. The man, caught mid-inhale while lighting a spliff, is presented in a blurred portrait. This focal distortion not only abstracts the environment surrounding him, but can also serve as a visual metaphor for an altered state of consciousness, of desired or experienced euphoria. The moment is intensely personal. Is he alone? Do the men he commiserates with speak openly about their hopes, fears and feelings of hurt? This meditation draws us into imagining the inner world of the man: potentially someone who longs for space to belong, to transgress obligations of individual silence in the performance of “manliness”.
Marlon James, Medz (2022), digital photography, 50 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
“Communion” (2022) shifts focus to another performative gesture: the exchange. James captures the tactile engagement between two sets of hands, their interpersonal dynamic underscored by intimate touch. This ritual is documented – the spliff’s transition from one man’s lips to its careful reception, often accompanied by a gestural wipe of any residual saliva, before being re-engaged by the next smoker. This social choreography highlights a deeply ingrained practice and ritual bonding for men in areas like Belmont.
Marlon James, Communion (2022), digital photography, 50 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Representing men’s isolation as well as their connectedness and bonds are critical to James’s vision. The series was inspired by his desire for intervention. He shared, “I did this series because I noticed that new generations of young men were more open and vulnerable with each other. This was different from the days when I was younger. So, I wanted to find a way for people of my generation to understand the changes in our world[3].”
This framing engenders new insights about men and intimacy, the layered meaning of touch at twilight. James takes a hard look at masculine performance, at men who aren’t altogether different from himself, men who can provoke the eye and ire of some. In self and social reflection, he interrogates the familiar and poses new questions to this established representational framework. Young men and boys in Belmont, Trinidad and Tobago, as in the urban communities of Kingston, Jamaica, are involved with “continuous male bonding in the streets”[4]. Many boys in urban margins learn to be men on the streets. James’s work sees the paradox in these formations. How they inhabit spaces and form bonds to be close to survive, to be later torn apart by beliefs about their personhood, one received in history and reasserted by so-called strong men in the contemporary. This visual meditation enters the world where boys and men typically harden, but find shared moments meant to offer them closeness and freedom.
This art review was developed in fulfillment of the Burnaway 2025 Art Writing Incubator and published in a digital chapbook. Thanks to Natalie Willis Whylly for their mentorship and insightful comments on this review.
[1] The phrase “hold a medz” is Jamaican parlance for participation in a meditative ritual of smoking marijuana, often in a collective.
[2] Beth Kramer, “Postcolonial Triangles: An Analysis of Masculinity and Homosocial Desire in Achebe’s A Man of the People and Greene’s The Quiet American,” Postcolonial Text 4, no. 4 (2008): 45.
[3] Interview with artist and author on August 3, 2025.
[4] Donna Hope, Man Vibes: Masculinities in Jamaican Dancehall (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2010), 45.
