Maria Nunes claims to have left behind the world of history as a student and teacher but she has actually gone nowhere.
Five years into life as a full-fledged professional photographer, Nunes is generating through-the-lens first drafts of history via her work as a chronicler of contemporary performing arts and culture.
"When I began, I really did not know the direction (in which) my work would go," the former champion golfer and sports news broadcaster confessed at a studio session last Tuesday. "I just knew I wanted to pursue this (but) very quickly, directions began to emerge."
Such "directions" led Nunes, whose photos have appeared in the T&T Guardian, to the practice of documentary photography as a way of capturing and relating the stories of the people, places and things that come together as essential elements of Carnival, dance, theatre, the culture of pan and what she describes as "parang as a way of life."
Her conversation with an audience of visual and performing artists, fellow photographers and other interested folk at Studio 30 in Woodbrook amounted to a discourse on the value of the discipline of history itself�its moral and ethical parameters and the requirement of truth.
"My photography is how I continue to live my love of history and to understand its relevance today–to continually investigate the questions that history poses," Nunes said.
When asked if she was aware that in the end, not many people might pay attention to the stories being captured and told, Nunes responded with words to the effect that the telling of the stories of people and what they do was important. In a sense, history is important. Full stop.
Drawing from a variety of private professional and officially commissioned work, the Nunes collection exhibited at the session had, as a largely common concern, the transition of artforms such as the performance art of Carnival including the Blue Devil tradition, Moko Jumbies, stick-fighting and Jab Jab mas', together with pan and the world of parang.
In all instances, people and their environments are captured in motion or in musical flight. "You can almost hear the music," Nunes said of some photos. "You can see the movement."
As photographer-in-residence for dancer/choreographer Makeda Thomas's New Waves project, Nunes also travelled to Haiti where she confronted, head-on, the journalistic dilemma of the freedom to shoot against what some in the audience interpreted as the possibility that human photographic subjects in public spaces can be exploited.