While visiting family in Hope Bay, Jamaica, Kansas City-based photographer Barrett Emke also spent a few days in the country’s north coast—in a town called Port Antonio—which is where he spotted this man looking pensively out the window of a passing bus. He knew instantly that it would make a great addition to his ongoing series called, fittingly, “Port Antonio.”

“I sort of had in my mind all the great street photographers while I was wandering around town,” Emke says. “There’s something peaceful about his expression in the midst of a bustling city scene that is a metaphor for how I felt about the pace of life there.”

Emke captured this quickly as the bus passed by, but he notes that the most challenging part of his series, which includes other images of the locals, was, he says, trying to maintain a respectful balance as an outsider while also attempting to create intimate portraits. “Bombarding people with a camera as they’re going about their daily lives can feel intrusive on my part,” he says. All the same, that invasion is a necessary component to the work. “My photographs are little searches for stories, without necessarily arriving at an endpoint. I aim to honor the subjects I’m photographing and to allow enough space for them to shape the image, too.”

(Captured using a Sony a7R II with a FE zoom lens.)

© Barrett Emke

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