Gregory Halpern, Untitled, 2019, fromLet the Sun Beheaded Be(Aperture/Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, 2020) © Gregory Halpern

“Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear,” wrote Aimé Césaire, Afro-Caribbean poet, author, and politician, in his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

Césaire’s eloquence perfectly captures the frustration of a man who is used to having his life treated as less meaningful. The plight of the black man, whose ancestors were once enslaved, serves as the only appropriate inspiration for photographer Gregory Halpern, who went to Guadeloupe in search of how best to depict Césaire’s culture and country, its surface marred by years of colonialism and slavery.

The stark writing of Césaire’s poetry served as a starting point for Halpern as he strived to depict Guadeloupe as part of the French-American Photography Commission contest, called Immersion. Halpern wanted to understand what other people thought when they thought of France, not just from a tourist’s perspective. Instead of planning his photos, he opted to allow stray cats, the poetry he read from Césaire, and the history of the island to guide him.

In 1493, Christopher Columbus reached the shores of this two-island archipelago with dreams of colonizing it for the Spaniards. Although the Spaniards were driven out of Guadeloupe by the start of the 17th century, this would only mark the beginning of another century of brutal violence and tragic pain for its people. The French soon took over and established the system of slavery that remained until it was abolished in 1848.

Side-by-side, the islands of Guadeloupe have often been compared to the broken wings of a butterfly, beautiful but battered. Their past is tightly interwoven into the fabric of the island. Halpern saw this in his photo of the shortleaf fig tree as it grew into and out of the former slave prison in the town of Petit-Canal. Halpern sees the tree as the island’s way of both tearing apart the past and reminding everyone of the loss.

Reflecting on his experience in Guadeloupe, Halpern noted that he often felt like an outsider. In today’s culture where trophy-hunting, or appropriating a culture through photos, is commonplace, Halpern was especially sensitive to not cross that line. He stated, “As a white, American man with institutional support, I’ll never fully understand his experience, or what it is to be Black or Caribbean. But, I am still deeply moved by his work, and my hope is that I have done it justice; that by responding to it I have engaged in a positive form of creative exchange, a homage.” Confronting this tenable existence in his own work adds to the feeling of eternal and internal conflict in every photograph.

Like Césaire’s work, Halpern wanted to photograph the simultaneous beauty and tension of the island. In the photo of the young man pointing to his tattoo, he was able to capture the clear defiance and pride this man had that he was standing before Halpern today despite the world’s best attempts to keep him down. Halpern may have felt like an outsider, but at this moment he was invited to witness a powerful moment of triumph.

The monograph Let the Sun Beheaded Be is copublished by Aperture and the Fondation d’entreprise

Hermès. Check our the book on Aperture here.

Check out more of Halpern’s work on his website and Instagram.