I grew up on New Providence in the Bahamas, and still live on the south side of the island. After leaving school, I worked with my dad in construction, and that’s where I started taking photos. For the first couple of years, I used my flip phone, playing with images of nature and flowers on the sites we were working on, but in 2010 I bought my first DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera and started teaching myself about photography.
I started doing a lot of landscapes. I tended to shoot at sunrise or sunset, and became interested in taking photos of people in vacant spaces. Because I didn’t have a model, I used a tripod and a timer to include myself in these very fantasy-looking naturescapes.
This shot came about on a day when I woke up feeling I needed to try out something new. I took three or four different outfits to the western part of the island along with a few props, one of which was this cone. I often keep random items I find, sometimes incorporating them into images.
The road I was on leads to a dead end, so cars don’t drive along it much. It was a pretty safe space – I almost felt like I was in my own back yard. I’d been playing with ideas, and putting the cone on my head was the last one I tried that day.
I just liked the way it looked but, as you can imagine, it was quite suffocating. Then I remembered I had a smoke bomb in the car and it just happened to fit into the tip of the cone. Looking back, it’s a wonder I survived.
I’d tried many shots and was getting tired. But it occurred to me that this shot really did look like someone losing their mind, going ballistic. The way I’m gripping the cone makes it unclear whether I’m trying to throw it off or hold it on.
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