“A form of adoration”: Amber Pinkerton on photographing Jamaica from a Jamaican gaze

Looking back, Amber now finds this almost funny. In retrospect, she can observe how her creative thinking had been indoctrinated by a European and American gaze. A notable distinction between her work then and now, for instance, is the use of white models which seldom make an appearance in her work today. While her work has appeared within the pages of Dazed, i-D, Document Journal, AnOther, Vanity Fair, Love and so on, her commissions take us far and wide across the contours of the haute couture scape. But whether it’s a commission or otherwise, at present, Amber’s photography is a reflection and examination of Black identity. In order to realise this, however, she had to go back to Kingston, where the presiding culture projected images of white bodies and Eurocentric aspirations to its Black majority population. 

Born and raised in the Jamaican capital, Amber recalls a childhood ladened with creativity. At the age of six or seven, she remembers telling herself that she was going to be an artist. Her medium traversed from ceramics, performance art, painting and dance, but on the cusp of her 13th birthday, photography took the lead as her parents recognised a budding interest and gifted her a Nikon D3000 for the occasion. Websites such as Picnic helped develop her digital editing abilities and expand “bizarre ideas”. Like a true child of the noughties, there were afternoons spent dressing up and taking self-portraits on self-timer, which she then manipulated on the website. 

This marks a pivot in Amber’s story. Though her first year in London was exciting in some respects, the inequality she saw and experienced first hand inspired new themes to rush into the work. Her photography became less centred on fashion, and instead started taking up an activist stance – highlighting issues of colourism, representation and identity at the crux of the photography. “I started to feel that otherness,” she tells us, after being in London for a while. “I started to feel quite isolated as well, because I didn’t know any Caribbean people for years and years.” Surrounded by a majority white student body, she found herself “suddenly in this space of discomfort”. And for the first time in her life, she felt estranged. 

Amber soon dropped out of film school and started to build a freelance photography career, with her own intentions at the forefront of the photography. Instead of emulating the established editorial oeuvre, she looked within to discover her own unique form of creative expression – a way of thinking that took her across the Atlantic Ocean and back to Jamaica. Looking at her early work now, Amber can see a subconscious message starting to poke through the surface. These images are imbued in undertones of race and class, but the message appears timid and uncertain in its communication. “There was a part of me that felt quite uncomfortable with it,” she reflects. “Like it was going to rub some people the wrong way.” 

Race politics in Jamaica and the UK are largely different. Where much of the UK’s issues come down to comparisons to the white hegemony, in Jamaica, there is more colourism at play which sees “the Black community divided by skin tone or class.” The challenge for Amber was to navigate these two very separate issues at the same time, underlining her work with an assured universality that applies to any context. She does this wholeheartedly through casting. 

“I like to use real people,” says the photographer, centring people “who are usually unseen or underrepresented in some way.” She admits how this ethos is something of a cliché today, as many an ad campaign can adopt this lingo to boost its public-facing morale. But when it comes to Amber’s work, the lensing of Jamaica’s residents is “a form of adoration” that she hasn’t seen previously. In this regard, she’s observed photographers highlight what Jamaicans don’t have, and wanted to flip this around. “For me, it’s more about the humanity and showing that these people are just people, like everyone else.” She continues of her street-cast shoots: “people might categorise [their outfits] as ghetto or ugly, or whatever it is. But to me, I feel like those people are the heart of Jamaican culture, because as you go up the hierarchy of class, you find that the culture withers away more and more.” The privileged classes, she notes, are more likely to take fashion or cultural cues from neighbouring America.