Eddy White Master Photographer
It’s always a thrill to discover an artist who snatches your breath away and makes you see the world around you in a new and different light. Eddy White’s new exhibition, AY AY CRUCIANS: Twin City Historical Photography, which opened recently at Cane Roots Art Gallery in Christiansted, performs such a feat. Mr. White’s stunning collection of black & white and color photographs go a long way to redefining what we normally think of as a photo of a building, a scene, a place, a moment in time.
Mr. White seems to conjure up some sort of magical balancing act before clicking the shutter on each of his subject matter. He proceeds to his final photographical destination, not by any predetermined staging of what his camera’s eye is programmed to see, but on the wings of his own instincts, his feel, his artist’s touch, much in the same way a great old astrologer might have found his way to predicting the day’s events by interpreting the alignment of the planets and stars.
Mr. White’s photographic interpretation of historic, and usually broken-down, neglected, old wooden and cement buildings across the island of St. Croix not only tugs at the heart for their left-behind fate, their fall from grace, but also instills them with a new life, a life that somehow brings them, once again, to the forefront of our mind and makes us think about what they once were and why they have traversed into the state they have become. It is a wrenching experience in many a sense, an embarrassment as to why society has passed over some of these grand old dames, these sweet shacks, and left them to decay. Their tattered walls, broken down steps, neglected facades, so many memories of days gone by.
Yet, it is the way that Mr. White presents these age-old beauties, recasting each of them in a historic and gracious manner. His way of blowing-up each photo, so that it is not just some snapshot taken from a cell phone, or a photo in a family album, but a life-like rendering of these survivors in time, a remembrance to all who view them, that, yes, once they were a great place, where people gathered, where dreams were made, where laughter ruled the day, where lovers reached for the stars.
It is a touch of their past greatness that Eddy White instills in his subjects, as if he were their last hope in showing what they really were once all about. Such is particularly the case with “1946 Market St.” the old Avis Newspaper building, shrubs and weeds growing out of its empty windows, shooting through its roof, its hulking shell still somehow standing in remembrance of the days when it was a thriving print newspaper, a bastion of discourse and civil conscience.
And “6 Hill St,” well-known to all who enter Christiansted from the back side, looking as if it could still support families, take-in borders; framed by telephone wires, a small tree growing up along its facade, seemingly still on the verge of breathing life, but a bordered-up grand dame that suffered its death throes long ago.
This collection of blown-up black & white photographs relate Mr. White’s talent for shoving the past in our face and making us realize just what we have left behind.
Still, there is surely another side to this brilliant man with a camera. There are color photographs that extoll the beauty of the present, that sing about the wonders of St. Croix. “Full Moon King Christian Hotel” is a dazzling spectacle of sparkling lights that show off the wonders of Christiansted at night, as if it were a town taken from the stories of Scheherazade, the full moon casting its spell over the scope of it, a star-spangled feeling that in the dawn’s early light she was still standing proud.
“Milkyway at Point Udall,” marks the mystery and beauty of the place, the triangular shapes reaching upward to a glowing sky, reminiscent of the powers of Stonehenge.
Perhaps the piece de resistance, “Aloy Wenty Nielsen Bypass” (rumored to have caught the eye of Governor Bryan), conveys all the beauty that is the Virgin Islands. Its spectacular blending of shades of blue, the ocean, the sky, the three islands in the background: St. Thomas, St. John and the BVIs, floating as if they were drifting atop the earth’s crust, the clouds ushering the whole scene off to some other dimension.
And of course Cane Roots Art Gallery is such a perfect venue for this steller exhibition. Its proprietor, Sonia Deane, who possesses the soul of an artist, who has developed this bastion for the arts on the west side of Company Street, is the real unsung heroine of the St. Croix art scene. Ms. Deane has recognized emerging artists and established artists and allowed them to flourish on the clean white walls of her lovely French inspired building.
AY AY CRUCIANS closes on Feb. 28, 2025 at Cane Roots Art Gallery 340-718-4929
