Kathryn's Constant Quest

I just returned home from a lovely trip to the southwest USA. One thing I love about visiting the States is the availability of things. Unlike in Trinidad, where one sometimes has to go to multiple different groceries in order to make one recipe, everything is available to you in the You Ess of Aye. I’ve waxed poetic before about the produce section of Whole Foods and how it inspires me to want…

  On the way to the Pitch Lake the other day the team and we took a wrong turn and stumbled into Narnia. This post is just a reminder that sometimes you find the most wonderful discoveries when you don’t make it  where you intended to. Photography: Kyle Walcott Photography Jumpsuit, tobi.com, similar here    

This is a blue wall in Woodbrook that I pass all the time. I stopped to look at it for longer than the usual 3o milliseconds a couple weeks ago and truly appreciated its vibrant colours along with the purple bushy things. That’s what this blog is about, really, finding beauty in unexpected places, and where is more unexpected than the place we have become so used to…our own home. A post I read…

Random Roaming in the bush

\\My high school friend Andrea visited home recently and had a great idea to revive an old tradition of ours. When we were younger and lived in the New York metropolitan area, we developed a series of limes, just us two, called “Random Roaming” in which we would just walk around and explore different areas of the city. In the meantime since that has happened, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat…

\ My birthday is coming up in two weeks. And what I’ve discovered, no matter how hard I try to avoid this whole being an adult thing, it jus keeps sneaking up on me, though I don’t recall attending any meetings or signing any contracts saying I wanted this to happen (if I can still get out of this please let me know how). Not only the boring stuff like bills and credit card payments and cleaning…

The next week I headed to Salvador in the state of Bahia, and this part of the trip was particularly meaningful for me, because Salvador is the city with the highest proportion of Afro-Brazilian citizens in the whole country. The state is extremely proud of it’s Afro-Brazilian heritage, and everywhere you turn black history and culture are celebrated, despite the fact that black Brazilians still are underrepresented in politics (the mayor of Salvador is white), and deal with horrible injustices every single day.

Even better, I was lucky enough to experience this with 11 other black women as part of a Travel Noire Experience. I signed up for the trip on a whim, as Brazil was not even on my upcoming travel radar, but I was doing it really to see if it was really so hard to get the trips, that generally sell out in an hour and a half. As it turns out, it’s not that difficult. Within 6 months I was in Salvador engaged in a jam packed week of activities that included surfing, samba and Afro-Brazilian dance and capoeira. We all agreed we definitely got our money’s worth.

One of the most poignant issues that arise when a group of educated woke black girls head to a city with a largely black populace that has been historically subjugated, is the issue of representation and agency. As we were led on a walking tour through downtown Salvador by  a relatively white tour guide, who was trying to teach us about the injustices that black Brazilians are subjected to daily, many of my fellow travelers were visibly uncomfortable with who was telling the story.

We had one other important storyteller on the trip with us. All Travelnoire experiences come with your own dedicated photographer, committed fully to capturing your experience for posterity, so you don’t have to be on your iPhone all the time taking ugly pics. Andre Perry, who we were lucky to have, chooses as his focus “Happy Black People” and from the pics below you can see he has a definite knack for bringing out black folks’ happiness.

On the day that we shot the image that I used for the featured image for this post, I was far from happy. I had lost one of the mementos that I value and cherish the most somewhere in the streets of Brazil and had spent most of that morning sobbing in despair. I sucked it up, however, determined not to ruin the last day of what had been an amazing trip so far, so I put on my new Jae Jolly caftan and went out to shoot with Andre. The image that resulted from that few minutes turned into my most liked, shared image on Instagram ever, coming from my worst morning in a while. You can probably agree that Andre really has a specific talent for tapping into joy.

In a world where black people are so often represented in scary, aggressive, ignorant and just overall NEGATIVE ways, it is inspirational that someone is focused on just representing us in our most joyous versions of ourselves, to make an effort to help reverse the centuries old negative imagery that is so familar. Andre is bringing that inspiration to people’s homes in his first book of photography aptly titled, “Happy Black People: Volume I” which is available for purchase online now.

Thanks so much Andre for the beautiful pictures of our beautiful memories and I hope to shoot with you again soon!

As for me, going on a trip with other black people to learn about the lives and experiences about global black communities was amazing. Can’t wait for my next TNExperience!

All images courtesy Andre L. Perry for TNExperiences

www.andrelperry.com

How do you do this again?

I’m baacckkkkk!! After a ridiculously long hiatus, I am back on the  blogging train, in a move to do more of the things that I am passionate about and which make me happy. I first started the blog as most people know it now (the travel and local posts) when I wasn’t feeling the greatest about myself and slowly as the blog took more shape,working on it helped rebuild my confidence. However I was…

Carnival 2015 - Luxe

        Many people asked me why they didn’t really see me this Carnival. And the above is the reason why. An overlong photo shoot that led to a domino effect of events that resulted in me being on the road for only three hours on Carnival Tuesday. But I loved this costume. The arm wings were so dramatic, I couldn’t get over them, and same for my friend Hannah’s luxurious cape/dress hybrid.

             There is so much to explore around the Savannah around Carnival time, as the excitement builds towards Monday and Tuesday. Kyle and I went to see what we could photograph a couple of weeks before the true excitement started (read: after the vendor huts were painted but before they were bastardized by bmobile branding).

I’ve wanted to get into the renovated Boissiere House (history

  It’s been months since I posted on the blog because I’ve been super busy relaunching my business, Immortelle Beauty, teaching and working on other fun projects. It’s been really hard to schedule my shoots and balance all of that but its 2015 and i’m gonna try again cause I really miss it.

I decided to start off by posting some images that have been gathering dust in my Dropbox.

My friend…

Kyle Walcott at Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival

  So Kyle is sneaky.

Unbeknownst to me, he has a film in the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, a short Documentary, Glass Bottom Boat which is in competition for three awards at the festival, Best Short Film – Documentary, Best Local Short Film – Documentary, and People’s Choice Award.

I’m so mad at him.

One of my goals for this blog is to promote Kyle and his work and he not telling me the…

THE Brown Cotton IRIS Photoshoot – Behind the Scenes

So by now if you’re my Facebook or Instagram friend, you will have seen the photoshoot I worked on with Risanne Martin of Brown Cotton, because we literally social media spammed people with the images for a week or more. (If you haven’t seen the pics yet, they’re coming up in the next post).

What I want to highlight in this post is the behind the scenes amazingness that…

Adrian Foster at #NYFW

Yesterday was the official beginning of New York Fashion Week S/S 2015. This week’s fashion week roster contains some familiar names that we need to look out for.

I just left New York on Tuesday, but I really wish I could have stayed to see Adrian Foster show his new collection on Sunday 7th September as part of the 9th Fashion Gallery NYFW event at the Helen Mills Event Space in Chelsea. This…

Know Your Country 2014 – Mate-Not

If I hear one more person complain that Trinidad is sooooo boring and there’s so little to do and that ‘everywhere’ you go you always see the same people, I will scream…in their face.

Not that they’re wrong. Living on a small island will always leave you faced with very limited options.

But it could be worse. We could be in St. Kitts. I’m sure there’s much less to do in St. Kitts. (To anyone…

The Caribbean Aesthetic – Meiling’s Kite

Since I became involved in Caribbean fashion, the words Caribbean Aesthetic has been a term that has been thrown around liberally. Apparently we desperately NEED to define the Caribbean Aesthetic. Designers who experiment in black, white and grey are told that they need more colour, because monochrome isn’t the Caribbean Aesthetic. Apparently, the Caribbean Aesthetic is floaty caftans,…

Lopinot http://wp.me/s2wWDw-lopinot

  Every child remembers going to at least one field trip during their primary school career to the Lopinot Historical Complex. Very little stuck out in my head from these trips. I couldn’t remember how far it was (further than expected) or how long it took to get there (longer than expected). I forgot what I did when I got there. Not being the most physically active child (okay, adult, person.…

Finding a Man…grove – with Kathryn and Thais

Living on a small island, it’s so rare that you make a true discovery. Everyone, everywhere has always been there done that, knows more about it than you and yawns when you get excited about it. So it’s truly exciting to go somewhere that people literally haven’t put their hands all over and is truly new. 

That’s how Thais and I felt the day we came across the mangrove forest at Point Petit Trou…