HUGEAUX PHOTOGRAPHY: Preface & Text - A Key in the York Part 2

That grandiose introduction might serve to enhance our appreciation of the service that artist/photographer Hugeaux has provided with his photo documentation of Key West, Florida, the very unique city of southernmost city in the United States, a place that many may only ever get to visit through the perceptive lens of his camera. Most people who know of Key West at all are familiar with its vividly colorful reputation as a laid-back yet exuberant resort with a permanent party going on, where almost anything goes, no one wears neckties or works too hard, and unique events such as the annual Hemingway look-alike contest (the celebrated author, like President Harry Truman, helped, quite unintentionally, to put the town on the nation’s popular culture radar screen) or the even wilder Gay Pride festival, among a host of other events and attractions. It has even become in recent years a stopover for cruise ships, an added bounty for its tourism-based economy.

Of course, the more savvy tourists always know that the greatest treasures lie off the beaten paths and outside of the breathless texts of promotional brochures, and Key West is no exception in providing such finds. Just off the main drag of Duval Street, down Petronia and across Whitehead Street, for example, lies a deep-rooted historic African American community established primarily by early Bahamian settlers. This area has recently been upgraded as the Bahamas Village, with its own gateway arch and economic incubator initiatives to encourage small shops and eateries that feature the islands unique Black cultural creations, thanks in large part to the Bahamas Conch Community Land Trust, the brainchild of Key West-born activist and icon Norma Jean Sawyer Atanda.

This organization has also led the way in helping the Black community to weather the storm surge of skyrocketing housing prices that has swept over the island, and established the Lofton Sands Museum, which occupies the house built by that important Bahamian pioneer and his family. Key West’s little-known Black history has more ominous ties as well, which have been gradually coming to light. Some 46 miles west, in the Marquesas Keys, lies the wreck of the slave ship Henrietta Marie, which had delivered her “cargo” of unwilling African captives to Jamaica before she sank, around 1700, in the Florida Strait. Recovered from that site were many revealing artifacts of the ignominious trade, including pewter dishes which still show the knife marks of the sailors, but none more compelling than the actual iron shackles, some small enough for children, which are on display at the Mel Fisher Museum (named after the late famed treasure hunter who discovered the wreck.)

The horrors of the so-called “slave trade” would come to haunt Key West in a dramatic, but ultimately more positive fashion in 1860, when 1,432 Africans, rescued from three captured slave ships, were brought into Key West in 1860, nearly doubling the size of the population at the time. During the time of their detention, waiting to be repatriated to Africa, their plight was eased by the efforts of local citizens who donated clothing, blankets, food and other assistance. Unfortunately, 295 of those captives did not survive and were buried at a site on what is today Higgs Memorial Beach. A monument is now under construction which will potentially make this sacred ground a World Heritage Site.

The spirit of cooperation that greeted the Africans was, and is still, a characteristic of this remote island community, where a shared sense of common concerns and common destiny leaves little room for the luxury of foolish prejudices, at least not to the extent that they have been manifest in other parts of the state and the South. Even so, harmony and tolerance were not always the Key’s defining characteristics. Long before settlers from other places arrived, the Key, one of a chain of peaks of an exposed coral reef that had risen out of the receding ocean, was the scene of long and bloody warfare between the Native Calusas and others, including pirates, so much so that the first Spanish explorers called it Cayo Hueso, the “island of bones.”

Land and history are inseparable, and all of these stories, and more, comprise the complex and colorful mosaic of human and natural forces that give the town of Key West its unique magic today, even as history continues to be made. The city’s unique, wide open, free-spirited character appeals to something deep in the universal human soul, which makes its story worth sharing with the world. Words can hardly capture it, but the camera’s eye, guided by an artistic and purposeful spirit, can bring the feeling of the place to life for viewers thousands of miles away, and well into posterity. This is the gift that Hugeaux brings to the very opposite environment of a busy, crowded, bustling major metropolis with his exhibition of “A Key in the York.”

His photography is not the work of the work of the voyeur, who seeks to intrude into private spaces or to present the lurid, the sensational, the stereotypical and the titillating, in the spirit of commercial paparazzi. Rather his is the consciousness of an African in America, steeped in arduously gained wisdom, that seeks deeper things and celebrates life, nature, beauty, human achievement and a zest for living. Hugeaux is the teller of many stories of many places with his camera, but Key West, Florida emerges as one his most special canvases ever.



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