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A rose that will always bloom

By Diane Phillips

There are photographers and then there was Roland Rose.

Other photographers gave him his title, the ‘Dean of Bahamian Photography’. Some called him the ‘Master’. When he passed away on June 16 at the age of 84 from cancer, and a note went out from friend and fellow photographer Linda Huber, more than a few tears were shed amongst a circle of photographers who knew that even at their very best, it would be hard, if not impossible, to do what Roland Rose did.

He aimed his lens and captured a world.

In vivid colour for nature in and black and white for emotion, Mr Rose seized moments and froze them, preserving them for the day he would no longer be here to record them: Peanuts Taylor beating a drum so powerfully you could see it in slow motion, building momentum, then to a crescendo. You could feel the wind and water whipping from an approaching storm, barrelling down on a small vessel, or the pulsing gyrations of a Junkanooer.

Mr Rose created images so alive they told a story without words, vibrating with energy or quieted by stillness. And yet from this same man came a gentle body of work of the flora and fauna of the Bahamas unmatched by anyone who followed. The soft sand of a beach so lifelike you can feel the warm grains slip through your fingers. Flamingos marching. A two-toed sloth making its way up a tree. The sun’s waning rays casting a shadow on a beached dinghy. Yellow elder in bloom, or his favourite, the deep magenta bougainvillea that he often used to frame a subject when just a touch of colour turned image into art.

Nothing was beyond his camera’s reach. From portraiture to breaking news, Mr Rose was agile, antsy, ready and a perfectionist who demanded from others the same standards he applied to himself. But there was one incident he could not master, a tragedy that haunted him to his dying day – the burning of his official photography of the Bahamas Independence ceremony at Clifford Park in July 1973, the exploding-withpride moment when the flag of Great Britain was lowered and the Bahamian flag raised. Negatives and photos were accidentally thrown into a fire during a clean-up at the Bahamas News Bureau.

Two years before that, in 1971, and at the same Bahamas News Bureau, Mr Rose met a young and eager photographer named Wendell Cleare, who at 21, had just walked into his first job. It would be the start of a lifelong friendship between the photographers.

Mr Cleare was among those shaken by the loss of the ‘Master’. He shared these thoughts: “As a young photographer, Roland treated me as a little brother. He trained me and gave me directions in the dark room and on the field. He was always willing to teach me. He was always willing to show me and assist me with any request I had. He was special to me; not only in the photography world but in life itself.”

Linda Huber (Flowers of The Bahamas, Nassau’s Historic Landmarks) also praised Mr Rose for his willingness to share, never hesitating to demonstrate the best angle, what aperture to use, judging light, speed.

Mr Rose was so Bahamian it was hard to think of him as anything but. In fact, he came to this country at the age of eight or nine from Italy when his father accepted a job as head of groundskeeping and landscape for the owner of what was then Hogg Island, now Paradise Island. Taking pictures became such a passion, that by the time he was 13 he traded in his most prized possession, a harmonica, for a camera.

As a teenager, he joined the Bahamas Development Board, the precursor of what is now the Ministry of Tourism, and for the next nearly seven decades chronicled the highs and lows and special moments of Bahamian life. With his wife, Barbara, and two children, he travelled the world, and though he grew up in a developing island nation, was always eager to experience something larger, newer, different. And every photographer who knew, or all but worshipped the work he produced, marvelled at how quickly he adapted to digital photopraphy and how proficient he became at using technology to enhance images effectively.

Derek Smith, another of the greats with a camera, said: “Roland was a true professional. I met him in the early ‘70s at the Camera Club of the Bahamas, that’s when the professional photographer taught the budding photographers how to take good photographs and he became my mentor. Roland always kept up with the times with his camera equipment; he always had the best. He used Canon equipment, and I do, too. I recall in 1993, at a photographic exhibition held by six professional photographers at the Central Bank, he pulled me to the side and said, ‘You remind of me the way you take photographs.’”

To Mr Smith, that was the greatest compliment of all, for the ‘Dean of Bahamian Photography’ to say he resembled him in style.

In recent years, Mr Rose’s work appeared on The Tribune’s most colourful page, ‘Through a Rose Coloured Lens’, which ran every Friday in the Weekend section.

In our office, we worked with Roland Rose over the years on wide-ranging assignments from the gardens, animals and birds at Ardastra to official ribbon-cuttings. In 2008, I helped arrange and coordinate a photography exhibit at Central Bank showcasing the work of Fleur Melvill-Gardner and Roland Rose, both now deceased. It was called ‘A Rose and a Fleur: Motion & Emotion’ and many of the images that circulated upon news of his death came from that show. It was the least I could do for someone who, every Christmas, remembered us at DP&A, bringing us a large, framed Roland Rose photograph. They decorate nearly every wall. I gaze at a black and white picture of a closet with discarded choir robes, a few drums, and a tear rolls down one cheek. Wendell Cleare, you were right when you said: “The photography world in the Bahamas was blessed to have Roland and you will be sorely missed. I love you, Roland.”

We all do. We always will.

ROLAND Rose at the Central Bank of the Bahamas Gallery for the exhibition “A Rose and a Fleur: Motion & Emotion” in 2008 (Photos/Eric Rose)

The Nobel laureate who gave a unique voice to the Black experience – Part II

Sir Christopher Ondaatje continues to write about the American novelist, essayist, and college professor who gained worldwide recognition when she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

In 1987, Toni Morrison published her most celebrated novel Beloved. It cemented her importance as an American author.

“Her importance as an American writer, without qualifying epithet, was certified by ‘Beloved’ in 1987. The story is based on the historical figure, Margaret Garner, a slave, who, when her escape was foiled, killed her daughter rather than have her taken back into captivity. She was prosecuted less for absconding than the destruction of property. By this stage of her career, Morrison’s narrative technique had evolved into something akin to the fluidities of black musicians like Charlie Parker or Lester Young – an analogy confirmed by the title of her 1992 novel, ‘Jazz’”

– John Sutherland Lives of the Novelists, 2011

Morrison’s novel imagines the dead baby returning as ‘a ghost, Beloved’ to haunt her mother and family. The book was a critical success and bestseller for 25 weeks. The New York Times book reviewed Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing the baby was so brutal and disturbing that it appeared to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate.

Despite its high praise, Beloved failed to win the prestigious National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award. It triggered one of the most controversial events of her career. A group of influential black writers, among them Maya Angelou, bought advertising space protesting the injustice. Two months later Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Oprah Winfrey’s powerful book club bought the rights and financed a later movie. novel, was published in 1992. A third novel, Paradise, was published in 1997, but well before that Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 – the first Black woman of any nationality to win the prize. The citation praised her as an author “who in novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” In return, Morrison, in her acceptance speech said:

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the US federal government’s highest honour for “distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities”. She was also honoured with the 1996 National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters – awarded to a writer “who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.”

Oprah Winfrey’s co-production of Morrison’s Beloved was released in 1998, directed by Jonathan Demme and flopped badly at the box office. It had taken 10 years to bring to the screen. Winfrey herself played the main character Sethe, with Danny Glover as Sethe’s lover Paul D. However, her newly launched book club in 1996 chose Song of Solomon as her main selection, and then an average of 13 million viewers of Winfrey’s talk show caused sales of over 800,000 paperback copies of Morrison’s earliest novel The Bluest Eye when it was made a selection of her book club. It also enabled Morrison to reach a much broader, popular audience. In all, Winfrey selected four of Morrison’s novels over a six-year period.

TONI Morrison

“Make up a story ... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”

– Toni Morrison

Morrison’s later fiction received a much more critical reception. Paradise (1998) told the story of a massacre of whites by Blacks people in 1970s’ Oklahoma. It is a much more contrived piece of writing than Beloved. But Morrison was popular enough to withstand some criticism. She explored different art forms collaborating with André Previn on the song Honey and Rue in 1992, and in Four Songs with Sylvia McNair in November 1994 at Carnegie Hall. Sweet Talk: Four Songs on Text and Spirits in the Well were written for Jessye Norman with music by Richard Danielpour in 1997, and with Maya Angelou and Clarissa Pinkola Estés. She also provided the text for composer Judith Weir’s woman.life. song commissioned by Carnegie Hall for Jessye Norman, which premiered in April 2000.

Morrison wrote the libretto for the new opera Margaret Garner based on the protagonist of her novel Beloved. It premiered on May 7, 2005, at the Detroit Opera House with Denyce Graves in the title role.