"I WAS HERE BUT I DISAPEAR": Ivanhoe "Rhygin" Martin and Photographic Disappearance in Jamaica

In an article titled “The Photograph as a Receptacle of Memory,” the Jamaican-born artist Albert Chong asks, “Where are the great photographs of the Caribbean, the iconic pictures that have become part of the visual memory of the people and their struggle for everything from freedom to independence and the construction of nations from slave colonies? . . . Where are the sadly, or gladly, profound photographs to be found”? In this essay I engage Chong’s lament about the dearth of iconic photographic images in the Caribbean, which comes out of his own exploration of questions of memory, temporality, and photography’s ghostly remains in his artistic practice. I take up Chong’s observations on photography and iconicity as a starting place in my consideration of one aspect of the afrotrope, a neologism that aims to give descriptive form to the tropes that are transmitted and translated across African diasporic populations, and across time, space, and media. I explore these questions by concentrating on an image that Chong singles out as one of the exceptions to photographic absence in the Caribbean context—a widely reproduced photograph used in and as a poster for the 1972 Jamaican-produced independent film The Harder They Come. The film was based on the real-life exploits of Ivan or Ivanhoe Martin.