There’s a quietness and grace afforded to its subjects that is immediately striking when stepping back to experience Out of Many, One People, Brianna Roye’s portraiture series documenting LGBTQ+ people of Caribbean descent.

Roye’s photographs throughout this series present her subjects vulnerably, and tender in their stance. Warm, colourful and often shot outdoors, many of the images evoke a sense of continuity across geographies. Lush greenery and the bold colours so commonly seen on the facades of Caribbean houses are prominently featured. Conversely, muted tones convey the poignancy of existing at the margins of a culture where one’s queerness never allows them to feel quite at home.

Seeking to disrupt the ways that queerness has been invisibilized in Caribbean communities, the series represents a powerful recontextualization of the Jamaican idiom “Out Of Many, One People.”

The phrase was originally conceived to highlight the racial diversity of an island whose history of violent and forced migration has resulted in a mosaic of racial identities. Repurposed in Roye’s portraiture series, it becomes a question reframed through the lens of queerness. Who is rendered visible throughout the diaspora in a culture with a discordant dialectic concerning sexual & gender expressions?

Shot on medium format, Roye describes the process of shooting the series as slow and intentional, stating that “queerness has informed the way I photograph people.” Depicting subjects with the care so commonly found and nurtured in queer spaces (often out of necessity), Roye likens the process to an embrace.

An expansion of queer, diasporic geographies, Out Of Many, One People functions as an intra-communal conversation, archiving connections made and stories gathered. Through this exercise in documentation, lone stars become a constellation — one that can hopefully serve as a guide for continued, intergenerational explorations of what it means to be queer and Caribbean.