Fruit Bowls and Tiger Masks: A Caribbean Coast Tourism Campaign

A tourism commission on Colombia's Caribbean coast - palenqueras balancing fruit in the colonial streets, carnival masks at full volume, and quiet frames of travellers looking at flat water.

Tourism campaigns for the Colombian Caribbean have a default setting: a beach, a cocktail, and nobody local in the frame except behind a bar. The brief here was the opposite - lead with the culture, and let the water be the thing you rest on between.

Photographing palenqueras properly

The women who sell fruit from bowls balanced on their heads are the most photographed people on this coast, which is exactly the problem. Almost every image of them ever made is taken from three metres away by somebody who did not ask.

So we booked them, paid them, spent a morning with them, and shot at conversational distance. That changes everything visible in the frame. The first image in this set is three of them laughing with a visitor rather than posing at one. There is one clean sunlit portrait where the light comes straight through the headwrap. They look like professionals doing a job they are good at, because that is what they are.

Let the carnival be loud

The masks needed the opposite treatment. A feathered tiger head or a horned marimonda is already operating at maximum, and any attempt to be tasteful about it produces a worse picture.

So those frames are shot close, wide and straight on, filling the frame edge to edge with feathers and teeth. No context, no negative space, no elegance. The children dancing in red polka dots are shot the same way - low, close, arms coming at the lens. It is the register I use every year at the Carnaval de Barranquilla and it does not translate into any other kind of subject.

“A feathered tiger mask is already at maximum. Any attempt to be tasteful about it makes a worse picture.”

The quiet frames earn the loud ones

In between there are three almost silent images: a man under a palm roof looking at the water, a woman in profile against flat pale sea, a traveller turning a hat over in his hands by the shoreline. Muted, low contrast, nothing happening.

A tourism set made entirely of carnival is exhausting after four frames. The quiet pictures are what make the loud ones land, and they are also the ones that sell the actual product, which is the idea of being somewhere calm.

This coast is the most photographed part of Colombia and still the least understood. My other work here runs from the city portraits in Barranquilla to the Aguila campaign in Cartagena.