Kweyol close-up: photojournalist Chris Higgins captures Saint Lucia's Kweyol culture with his black-and-white images that demand a new perspective on the sun-drenched Caribbean.

• Author: Higgins, Chris

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SAINT LUCIA SITS AT THE HEART OF THE LESSER ANTILLES, the Caribbean region extending east of Puerto Rico to the northern coast of Venezuela. It belongs to a thin line of islands known as the Windwards that cut across the rough Atlantic to form the tail end of the West Indies.

In 1997, I visited Saint Lucia briefly for the first time to see a mother who'd gone blissfully AWOL, and decided to return with the intention of photographing the island. It was an ironic twist in my life. Years of bumming around Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America, I never had any interest in traveling to the Caribbean. Huddled in the pub, planning trips with friends, I saw it as this block on the world map of hotels and resort compounds.

But a year later, I found myself renting a cabin in Saint Lucia for a couple of months in Fond St. Jacques, a valley in the mountains outside Soufriere. There was no running water or electricity, so I lived by candlelight and cooked over a coal pot stove. At night, when the farmers had returned to their homes lower down, I would sit alone on the porch and sip cinnamon bush tea. The darkness surrounded me like a black curtain, and all you could hear were the sounds of life throbbing in the forest. Looking back, it was the closest I'll ever get to experiencing what it was like in the early days after Emancipation when many newly freed slaves chose to live as independent peasants on whatever land was available, cutting their own little islands of freedom out of the forest one tree at a time. During those months of wandering the countryside and meeting people, there seemed to be such a strong disconnect between the island life I experienced and the one portrayed in travel brochures.

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It was this sense of disconnection that drew me back to Saint Lucia--how those images of long sandy beaches, blue skies, and happy white people have obscured cultural identity and diversity. A sense of the humanity is lost by grouping the Caribbean islands together as a set of interchangeable generic "destinations." One of the goals of the Kweyol photographs--the word is Patois for Creole--is challenging viewers with a different level of understanding the Caribbean. By observing these places in detail, we not only gain a deeper understanding of other cultures but also of ourselves as visitors in foreign lands.

Making the images in black and white, I wanted to encourage viewers to approach the subject with...