His poem is part of the CXC curriculum, and he's an accomplished reporter and photojournalist, but tonight Rowland Parks is going out on a limb by calling his photographs, art and putting it on the walls for the critics to consume at the Image Factory. Sure his photos have been on the front page of the Amandala many times...but art? Well that's a brand new bag, but parks has it choc filled...with striking images and surprises, like topless pictures of Pulu Lightburn and Dickie Bradley. Those alone are worth going to check this show out...but there's more, parks reveals the subject of his lifelong love affair, Belize City.
Rowland Parks, Photographer
"Ronald Clarke says it's a proud embattled city. I think that still stands true today, that still rings in my ears and when I go out and see certain scenes and try to document certain things.
No picture comes about by accident. It's a moment or an opportunity, just
a fresh moment. That is basically my way of doing it. I don't like too much posing. If you notice a lot of these pictures are just spontaneous, they just happen. A couple of the pictures people are posed for like for example the picture that Andrew Steinhauer famously labeled the 'ghetto queens.' I was going home one night and I saw these two ladies, I've photographed them before, and they asked me to take a picture. They were all dressed up, it was a Friday night and they were going out on the town and it just happened to be in that section of Raccoon Street almost by a zinc fence so the zinc fence gave it the elegance that you are talking about.
I was working at AMANDALA at the time
sheltering from a rainstorm and I saw these kids being battered by the rain. It was raining really hard and they were geared up for the rain and I just pulled out my camera and from the distance I got a good shot. I love close up activity I like the intimacy of being close to my subject, that's how that picture came about.
The pictures speak for themselves in that you get a feel for the city, the way people interact with each other and stuff like that."
The show opens tonight and runs for a month.
7NEWS produced for broadcast by News Director Jules Vasquez
Edited and Prepared for the internet by Keith Swift
