Contact Sheet 218: Samantha Box

Contact Sheet 218: Samantha Box
Paperback: 48 pages
Publisher: Light Work (August 2022)
ISBN: 978-1-945725-28-9

Samantha Box’s new body of work, Caribbean Dreams, is a series of complex studio still lifes of personal, familial, and regionally-referenced objects, heirlooms, fruits, vegetables, and plants, onto which she collages family and vernacular images, fruit stickers, packaging, and receipts. A departure from earlier methods and subject matter, the constructed, experimental, and unpredictable compositions of Caribbean Dreams embody Box’s exploration of multiple diasporic Caribbean histories and identities.

In 2015, Box was a Light Work Artist-in-Residence. This occurred midway through the decade or so that her work focused on New York City’s queer and transgender, and non-binary youth of color in a body of work she titled Invisible Archive. Now, Box has set aside her 35 mm camera and the photojournalistic style of that period for the methodical and deliberate view camera within studio space.

This catalog includes an essay by Light Work’s director Dan Boardman.
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Samantha Box is a Jamaican-born, Bronx-based photographer. She has exhibited work at the DePaul Art Museum, Houston Center of Photography, the ICP Museum, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Box has been an Artist-in-Residence at both Center of Photography at Woodstock and Light Work. She received an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from the International Center of Photography/Bard College (2019) and a certificate in Photojournalism and Documentary Studies from the International Center of Photography (2006). She has twice received the NYFA Fellowship in Photography (2010 and 2022).