The Beauty and Violence of Steve McQueen’s Floral Photographs

Bounty/ The act of giving: given generously or in great abundance, as in the yield of a crop. Or a reward offered, such as a price offered for the capture of a fugitive. It is a word that suggests beauty and violence, joy and fear.

Bountysinger and filmmaker Steve McQueenThe latest monograph, unearths two meanings of the word. Published by Mack Books and designed by Irma Boom, The book contains vivid photographs of Grenada’s flora taken by McQueen in the summer of 2024.: coral-fringed hibiscuses and clusters of crimson jungle geraniums, velvety chenille plants – their catkins drooping and caterpillar-like – and dancing flowers in cream and butter yellow. Bounty it also includes two poems, The Bounty by late Saint Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott and “beauty” by Dionne Brand.

“The inspiration for this project comes from going to the Chelsea Flower Show in 2023, although the idea was there before,” McQueen tells AnOther. Organized by the Royal Horticultural Society, it is considered the most famous horticultural exhibition in the world. Grenada won its 16th gold medal that year. “Its colonial style and the idea of ​​an English garden sent me on my way.”

Hidden within Grenada’s stunning beauty is a legacy of ingenuity and violence. The vastness of this island left it open for centuries of exploitation. The French colonized the island in 1649, then gave it to the English in 1763. Under British rule, the natives of Grenada, the Caribs, were exterminated and the island immediately became a center for the transatlantic slave trade. The British sent thousands of African slaves to Grenada to support sugar plantations. Both the French and the British changed the flora of the island, bringing cocoa, coffee and nutmeg. (Nutmeg is still the country’s main export; it produces 20% of the world’s nutmeg.) After the abolition of the slave trade, workers from China and India were brought to the island to work in the sugar and cocoa plantations.

“At one time, all these groups would have looked at these flowers in awe,” says McQueen. Through his in-depth study of the island’s structure, McQueen reflects on the island’s violent history, its consequences, and its undeniable beauty. “The representation of plants has always had an important place in the history of art,” McQueen adds. “This collaboration goes back to the Stone Age.”

“Sometimes the worst things happen in the best places. That’s the cruelty of life.” – Steve McQueen

McQueen’s father is Grenadian, and his mother is Trinidadian. McQueen says: “Grenada was always considered my home, even when I was at home in London. “At this point in time, it has become more important to me.” Bounty is the third work he has done in his father’s country. His 2002 video Caribs’ Leap is about the mass suicide of a group of Caribs who, to avoid capture by the French, fell off a cliff. Images of Grenada and its inhabitants are compared to a group of people falling from the sky. McQueen’s two-channel video work Ashes (2014-15) also serves as an elegy; a young fisherman from Grenada who was killed during a violent war with drug traffickers. blue, while the other refers to the construction of his tomb.

Like cotton and sugarcane, some plants have aggressive relationships. In 1787, the Royal Navy sent HMS Bounty to Tahiti to collect breadfruit, which was to be taken to the British West Indies. Naturalist Joseph Banks, the founder of Kew Gardens, who made his name by accompanying Captain James Cook on his travels, suggested that this plant was a source of cheap food for slaves. The breadfruit did not arrive, because of the popular mutiny that took place on board. It was successfully introduced later and became the center of many Caribbean cuisines, including Grenada.

This complex interweaving of associations is elucidated through Walcott and Brand’s poetry, which adds meaning and deepens the meaning of McQueen’s photographs. Both books are inspired by grief and the afterlife of addiction, what scholar Christina Sharpe calls “resurrection.” In The Bounty, written as an address to his late mother, Walcott reflects on the long-term legacy of colonialism, following its meaning in the country and in his mother’s life. He traverses the English countryside, the “blue hills” of Saint Lucia and the deck of HMS Bounty, connecting them as places where memory and history meet.

Brand’s poetry focuses on how we live in the midst of ongoing violence and crisis. In both poems, the endurance of beauty is almost unbearable, something that leaves one in awe and wonder. “Sometimes the scariest things happen in the best places,” McQueen recalls. “That is the evil of life.” The process of making the Bounty revealed to McQueen that, in Grenada, “There is a certain kind of patience that can change, transcend, and never end.”

Bounty contemplates the violence that results from the desire to conquer and possess beauty. McQueen hopes that Bounty “reflects the viewer and the nature around them in any way.” It asks us what the difference is between “the Tourist Board’s vision and the real Paradise,” as Walcott’s poem opens. We look at McQueen’s paintings and wonder, whose paradise is this? Whose is it, and what do we do with it?

Bounty by Steve McQueen is published by Mack Books and is out now.