In His First Solo Museum Exhibition, Photographer Kacey Jeffers Takes a Kaleidoscopic View of Life in Nevis

At the Patricia Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, photographer Kacey Jeffers’s first solo exhibition, “Multitudes” (on view through May 4), bursts with color and insight. Spanning five series and 25 photographs, the work—made in Nevis, the small Caribbean island where Jeffers was born, between 2018 and 2022—weaves a rich tapestry of human experience, inviting meditations on Black joy, individualism, and the influences of colonialism and tourism on the tight-knit (yet wonderfully varied) local community.

“I hope this exhibition encourages you to reflect on the idea that by rejecting the limitations of singular narratives, we actively contribute to the revival of empathy and compassion for those different from us,” Jeffers writes in an accompanying essay. “Extending such grace to one another is how we acknowledge that every one of us contains multitudes.”

Here, he walks Vogue through the five photo series that make up “Multitudes.”

Postcards From the Future

“Growing up, and I would have play cousins come to visit. Every summer they would come, and I would get to hang out with them. And for me, they kind of represented an escape, because suddenly I could go to hotels and I could go to swim in swimming pools. I love a swimming pool to this day: For me, in some ways, a swimming pool represents wealth. It represents, I’ve made it. There’s no sea in the series here, and it’s not a disparaging thing against pictures by the ocean, but when we think about access and we think about wealth, and we think about the symbols that represent these things, for me, a swimming pool is that. We need images of Black people by the swimming pool.

[As a child] I thought only white people were tourists, because that’s all I saw. So, this series was also about expanding the idea of who gets to be a tourist, in the sense of: Why can’t it be a single mom? It doesn’t always have to be a nuclear family; it could be a mother who just had a baby and she wants to escape. Why not? I grew up with a single mother, and culturally a lot of mothers don’t know what rest is. They don’t understand these concepts because they have to hustle. And in some ways, this was an homage to her—to my mother, her aunt, and to the women I grew up with.”

Every Day Is Another Chance

“In this section, the prints are smaller—it’s more intimate, and it’s a look into my family life. I lived in New York from 2015 to 2018, when I was pursuing photography and also just trying to figure out who I was as an artist, as a person. And then my work visa ended in 2018, and I went home, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do—not just as a photographer, but as a human being.

Because I wasn’t in New York, I didn’t have access to models and I didn’t have access to all the trappings of fashion photography that you think you need to make a good image. It was just like, this is where I’m at, and am I going to sit here and wallow in self-pity, or am I going to create? And the answer was just get up and create and make images and put one foot in front of the other.

I hadn’t been home in three years, and I started to use the camera as a tool for connection with my family. When you grow up in the Caribbean, the arts [are not considered] a viable career option. So when I went back, it was good to have my family be in the image-making.

The title is from a Lauryn Hill song. At the time, I was listening to her MTV Unplugged session quite a lot, and I think it just resonated because of the imperfection of it, and the beauty that was in that imperfection. In some ways, I felt like that was where I was at, mentally and emotionally.”

UNIFORM

“This project was one of the ways in which I started to think about how I could use my personal history to tell a story that could connect with people, regardless of whether they knew who I was, regardless of whether they had been to Nevis, regardless of whatever differences we might have.

These pictures made up my first book. It was self-published, and it was me making a statement about wanting to see myself represented in something like a book. I grew up reading a lot, so it was an opportunity that I wanted to give my inner child. And what was so beautiful about this project was the reach that it had, and how it connected with people from all walks of life. I had people purchase books from New Zealand and Australia and small villages in Japan. I think that just spoke to the power of my intention, and the power of telling human stories.”

Scenes From Around the World in the Aftermath of Queen Elizabeth II’s Death

“When Queen Elizabeth II died, Time magazine was doing a piece about the aftermath of her death in the Commonwealth countries. They reached out to various photographers around the world, asking them to document people’s reaction.

In my opinion, people in Nevis weren’t necessarily engaged with the Royal Family the way that the British population might have been, because they were our colonizers. We’ve been independent since 1983. [The Royals] make trips to the islands, but they really serve no purpose. When I walked into that bar [at right], I think I was probably the first person who brought the news [of Queen Elizabeth’s death] to them. And the woman—Muffet, the bar owner—I think in that moment, she felt a level of admiration for the queen. At the end of the day, it was her job to be the queen; that was part of her purpose. I think in some ways Muffet identified with that, so she rallied the men. She was like, ‘Let’s do a toast to her long life.’ I thought that was cool.

On the left is Ras Iroy, a local activist. He’s very active within the community, and when King Charles visited Nevis a couple years ago, Ras was the only person who was protesting the visit. He had made a sign—it wasn’t this one, but it was another one that basically said, Hey, where is our money? Where are the reparations? And he stood there with that sign and he told me that Charles saw the sign, stopped for a minute, looked at him, and nodded or something, and then walked off.”

J’ouvert

“J’ouvert comes out of slavery—out of when the enslaved were emancipated, and they took to the streets dancing. A lot of Carnivals and cultural celebrations within the Caribbean evolved from that.

For our summer festival, called Culturama, people get up early in the morning, they go to one part of the island, and there are these big trucks with bands on them, and the bands are playing live music and people are dancing and wukking up their waist and having a good time. The culture in Nevis is generally very Christian, but within this space of J’ouvert, the young people are dressed provocatively, and it’s one of those times when people feel free to be themselves and to let their hair down. I thought that was kind of fascinating—the ways in which this celebration is a place for individuality to be expressed, for joy to come alive, and for people to abandon the pressures of everyday life.”