Bleached Identity confronts the enduring legacy of European colonial indoctrination and its brutal shaping of Jamaica’s racial hierarchy. In Jamaica, proximity to whiteness still dictates privilege—a reality made sharper by my lived experience of racism in the United States.

I engaged thirteen Jamaicans across generations through audio interviews, skin tones, gender identities, and social backgrounds, capturing their realities in sixty-one macro photographs—marking sixty-one years of independence. Installed in a grid, these images surround the viewer with an uncomfortable truth: our skin is still currency.

Visitors sit on a bench stained in gradients of brown, bisected by an industrial metal pipe referencing the sugar industry’s exploitative legacy. This divide is not symbolic alone; it is a physical echo of how colorism continues to separate Black Jamaicans from each other.

Bleached Identity demands that we look closer—at race, at history, at ourselves—and listen to voices long silenced beneath the bleaching cream.