Vanley

You know, if you fall down and bruise your knee, you get beaten. You know, there are various ways of doing this. You know, there's a strap, which is the leather strap. If you and I are in class, and I've done something wrong, and they're gonna beat me then, they send you to go and get the stick or whatever it is, and you will come back with a best one.

Seeing the houses for me was quite strange. I think that most people you wonder, why there's so many houses? We don't have two-storey houses in Jamaica, where I came from at least, perhaps some shops but no, no houses. So imagine my surprise when you came and you saw, you know, as far as your eyes can see, just chimneys of houses. And, you know, it just looked quite bleak. And grey, really, I think I came here in May as well, which wasn't a very good time.

So there was always this inferiority aspects, you know, we've been placed in this not, working class, but sort of “underclass”. And I think, you know, when you're in that position, any form of racism, you know, it hurts particularly well.

You encounter some aspects of racism, but we became conscious when we came here of the plight of racism, generally, you know, we were able to look, I have an overview as to what was happening in Africa and the Caribbean, in Britain, in America, and so on.
I started working at the Polytechnic, and I had some skills. And that was – I was a studio attendant. So I was working in a print department and with photography, and so on. So I had the ability to make silk screens. And so I started making Malcolm X t-shirts.

I'm not equating my mother as being so violent, but she once told my younger brother to water the front garden and he didn't, and she came back and woke him up, and it was raining, and he was in the night watering the garden in the rain. 
You know you must do what you're told, sort of thing you know. "If you can't hear, you will feel."

There's no communication, there's no dialogue sort of thing going on. It is you just pick up whatever you hear. See, children are supposed to be seen and not heard. So you don't ask questions. 
You just get little bits of conversation and then even if it's not true, you can't verify it.

In fact, I didn't even know it was documentation. I didn't call it documentation. I just said I was going to photograph my people. I felt that history has a starting point. And I was quite fortunate to have been in England at the time to witness the arrival of people from the Caribbean.