PART FIVE:

We flew to beautiful Jamaica to photograph Coffee and Sugar Cane.

After the financial crash in 2008, I became disillusioned with commissioned corporate photography and with help from our advisors, my wife and I began shooting an photo library collection. We were fortunate to know a family of coffee farmers in Jamaica who ran the Twyman Estate high up in the Blue Mountains and they kindly offered to look after us if we came to do a shoot on their coffee farm. We also found a sugar cane farm and processing plant which I could shoot as well. Fuelled with bloody marys, my friend and top art director Ashley Jouhar jetted across the Atlantic from London and into another world.

The sugar cane farm was a huge operation set in a strange landscape. Which was an ancient sea floor complete with cliffs. Acres and acres of land spread with cane plants as far as the eye could see, and when we drove out amongst them they hissed at us in the hot wind. Whilst there was some cane cut by machine, it was still common practice for people to work with machetes out in the fields under tremendous heat which they were impervious to. The Cane is grown to a specific height it is when it is set alight and burned spectacularly to make it easier to harvest. The charred canes are loaded onto huge trailers that end up look like giant hedgehogs, then trundled away to the processing factory. I was privileged to be able to shoot inside the factory. It  was truly ancient. The cane goes to a holding area where it is craned into a crusher and the juice is extracted, the dry waste goes right on to feed a furnace which heats a boiler which powers a steam engine which in turn powers the crusher. Smoke comes out of the chimney. The boiler also heats the juice and boils it down until it crystallises into sugar. The sugar is the most beautiful slightly honeyed colour and taste, not like the white stuff. The waste product is Molasses which goes off to be made into Rum, we weren’t allowed to photograph that but we did get to drink plenty.
This project was never an art project but a commercial venture and went on to do very well, still dominating the market. It was all originally in colour and the images are still available for sale, (all fully model released). It was shot on Hasselblad H4d camera kit. I find it wonderful how black and white simplifies and directs the messages in pictures.
Assistance: The Twyman family Art direction: Ashley Jouhar Text editing: John Coombes