Beauty in the Eyes of a Camera

As the years passed and advancements in technology were made photography, an instant method of capturing people and places as they truly are, was developed. When one thinks about photography in Jamaica a few names readily come to mind among them Adolphe Duperly and J. Valdez. Duperly was a dynamic photographer whose daguerreotypes captured the essence of Jamaica in the mid 1800s. It was Duperly who photographed National Hero, George William Gordon about 1860.

J. Valdez is known to have won a gold medal in 1867 for an art exhibition. Photographs attributed to Valdez shows that he worked in Jamaica during the late 1800s perhaps early 1900. These photographs speak without words and they tell a brilliant story of Jamaica as it was then.