The National Gallery visits Cayman’s past

By Staff Writer

Images of Cayman’s recent past as retained by the Cayman Compass archives have been well distributed in recent months through Dart’s Time Back Cayman project, and now a wonderful exhibition of some of the most evocative photos are currently housed altogether at the National Gallery.

The opening night of the Time Back Cayman exhibition drew fascinated visitors all keen to embrace this historic collection of images that have been carefully restored and displayed for the Cayman public to enjoy.

Cayman Compass Archivist and Credit Controller Ivan Burges has been instrumental in creating the collection and said the collection of photos are from around 1981 to 1994. Earlier photos had unfortunately been lost in Hurricane Ivan, so this collection delves into Cayman’s recent history, shedding a keen light on the people and places of Cayman during the 1980s and 1990s. The Compass had photos up until 1999 but sadly photos between 1994 and 1999 were also lost in Ivan. After 1999 photos were digitised, Mr Burges advised.

The exhibition is a magnificent celebration of some of these historic images.

“It’s been a fascinating experience working with the National Gallery because this exhibition was all turned around within three weeks,” he advised. “Here we have about 100 photographs all printed by Cathy Church and all framed ready to go.”

Mr Burges said that most of the photos had been selected by the National Gallery, who had access to the 327,000 negatives in the Compass archives and they worked together with the Compass team to highlight a broad selection of life in the Cayman Islands in the not-too-distant past. The exhibition also included some old cameras that used film, to complement the photographs.

The entire project of digitalising all 327,000 negatives in the Compass’s possession was a huge undertaking whereby they were shipped off to the US via Cayman Airways, Mr Burges advised. Kieran Rankin from Dart and Craig Merren as Curator worked alongside the Compass team and volunteers from the community came on board to sift through the digitised photos, name and date as many people and photos as possible, and they have managed to go through between 3 - 4,000 so far.

Richard O’Carroll from Compass Leadership said the best 100 photos out of all those that have been tagged each month are uploaded to timebackcayman.ky for the public to enjoy.

The exhibition is the culmination of this enormous project.

It’s amazing to see 100 of the best photos here on the wall,” he said. “The National Gallery have done an amazing job. They’ve worked at hyper speed to pull this off in the last three weeks.”

Mr O’Carroll hoped that the exhibition would evoke a feel of nostalgia among those who visit, which was very important to Compass Media, an entity which saw itself at the heart of the community.

“These sort of projects, that thankfully Dart let’s us start with, allows that,” he confirmed.

National Gallery Collections Curator William Helfrecht echoed that sentiment by saying that the National Gallery cared for Caymanian culture and Caymanian heritage.

“It is very fitting that we’re seeing this exhibition here this evening,” he stated at the exhibition’s opening. “This show has been a major undertaking for our curatorial team: how do you choose 70 or 80 images when you have got almost 400,000 in this archive? As you are walking around, please remember this exhibition is merely a sampling of a much wider archive and a lot of work has gone into this.”

Mr Helfrecht said the National Gallery deferred to the Cayman Compass archivists in many of the choices. He encouraged all visitors to enjoy the historical images of these two decades. He said the recording of this era was of particular significance because while the National Gallery worked closely with the Cayman Islands National Archives with much older photographs, the real impact of the show was that it dealt with the recent past, with memory accessible to many.

“In fact, as you are looking around you may well recognise individuals, you may recognise yourself, you will certainly recognise some of the locales and places featured in these images. I think it has a poignancy and immediacy particularly now in this moment. It really reinforces what we do at the National Gallery and at our sister cultural organisations, that is preserving and protecting Caymanian culture,” he said.

The Time Back Cayman exhibition runs until 13th June.