When we travel, we can never truly see and experience everything a location has to offer. While vacations are a wonderful escape, the activities we engage in and the impressions we form are colored by who we are as people.

 

This concept—that we are ‘us’ wherever we go—is foundational to my background in anthropology. Anthropologists ask the question: How can we truly entrench ourselves in a culture that is not our own without carrying our biases with us? The answer is that we cannot, though we can aspire to.

 

Both of the above truisms inspired these images, which are from a Caribbean cruise I took in 2021. In each image, the viewer is only permitted to see part of something: the sky, the ocean, an island, a building, a basket, a beer stand, etc. There is always an obscuring factor that in some way impedes the ‘full view’ of a subject. In some instances I relied on the use of shadows, in others I intentionally framed images around a corner, through another physical object, or cropped them in to remove context. 

 

The title of this body of work is from my anthropological background. The “Nacirema” is a reference to an article published in 1956 by Horace Miner, in which the author describes the strange ritualistic practices of the Nacirema cultural group. Miner does not clue the reader in on the fact that he is satirically describing American culture.[1] The second word in the title is perhaps a bit more obvious—it’s COVID backwards. Since I took these pictures in November 2021, COVID strongly impacted my experience. We were not allowed to freely roam a majority of the ports we stopped at, and thus only saw extremely small portions of each island.

 

[1] Miner, Horace. “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist, vol. 58, no. 3, 1956, pp. 503–507., doi:10.1525/aa.1956.58.3.02a00080.