Amelia Troubridge is an Anglo-Maltese photographer of worldwide repute whose latest local exhibition explores aspects of Maltese life and culture spanning almost 30 years. Joseph Agius and Lara Zammit discuss with the artist the themes of her photographs and her views on Malta’s changing landscape and its people.
Amelia Troubridge’s current exhibition Faith, which is being hosted by Spazju Kreattiv and curated by Daniel Azzopardi, works as a photo-essay that documents various aspects of Maltese society, its beliefs and its defining idiosyncrasies.
Santa Marija Feast (Għaxaq, 1995)Thematically sub-divided into three sections, the exhibition illustrates the collision of three worlds that seem to dominate the Maltese raison d’être – religion, politics and community – all grouped pertinently under the general theme of ‘faith’.
Speaking to Times of Malta about the subject matter of her exhibition, especially in relation to its title, Troubridge said that “if you look at the images and walk through the show, it’s about how different people interpret faith”.
She maintained that her images highlight the values that we as Maltese were brought up with, not least those of family and hospitality, and address the topic of Malta’s place in the contemporary world.
There is also a lot of the artist’s “personal faith” informing her choice of photographs, and she said that there is something “raw and honest” about the images being presented.
Asked what Maltese people may glean from viewing her exhibition, especially with regard to what this could tell them about themselves, Troubridge said the images would speak to them about the value of community and that we should value nature, but especially that “we are not perfect, and that’s OK”.
“You may think that the exhibition is about Malta, but it’s not. We live in a globalised world,” she remarked, speaking about the effects of things like Brexit, Trump and social media on contemporary Maltese.
Kitchen Sink (Għaxaq, 1995)In the artist’s opinion, Malta’s story has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs in the last 30 years – from the heyday of the rave parties of the 1990s to becoming a member of the EU and on to the burgeoning economy of the recent past that resulted in the death of a very important investigative journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Once Daphne died, I felt I was an exile
Being half-Maltese has allowed her to be close to this country, yet also keep some distance from the events that have taken place in the recent past.
“I’m on the fence. I don’t live here, I don’t pay taxes here, I don’t work here… I was incredibly unencumbered by a lot of the negative stuff that’s been occurring. I’m doing this show because my friends and family were suffering. I couldn’t hear someone say one positive thing about Malta,” she said.
“Once Daphne died, I felt I was an exile. I needed to reaffirm my ties with this island and I had to really start from scratch, I felt that I had lost Malta in a way, but I realised that no one can take my relationship with Malta away from me.”
Waiting for the Gozo Boat (Ċirkewwa, 1994)Troubridge’s essay on Malta follows a path similar to that of famous photographer Robert Frank, who studied and photographed mid-1950s American society in a two-year project.
Malta Gentleman (Soho, London, 1999)The Americans is a magnificent and painfully honest photo-essay that sublimely demonstrates that life, although at times hard and humbling, could also be poetic and visually stunning. The Anglo-Maltese artist admits that she is indebted to Frank and hopes that one day, maybe in 40 years’ time, her body of work will be looked at and studied in depth.
“My body of work is not only about Malta. It is about four years of America and England in the 1990s, and Colombia and Brazil in that decade as well. There’s a lot there. To make an archive of it will take me a long time but that is what I now want to focus on. I will be honoured to have a level of affiliation to Robert Frank,” she noted.
She admits that she was blown over by a 1990s exhibition celebrating the work of another great photographer, William Klein. This was life-changing for her and was one of the culprits that got her hooked to the medium.
“Dorothea Lange, the New Deal photographers and William Klein are my major influences. They got me into photography,” she pointed out.
Malta is indeed the smallest country in the EU but it is a microcosm of the whole world. It requires faith to live through these difficult times, a faith in humanity, compassion, making peace with things. Faith is one such exhibition that shows the trials and tribulations of a miniscule country having limiting factors such as size, lack of natural resources and being mired in patriarchal bias. Yet the country’s story is blessed with great narrative power. Troubridge’s photo essay bears faithful witness to all of this.
Thirty years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breach of the Iron Curtain promised a brave new world and a chimeric redemption of mankind while transitioning into the new millennium. Troubridge was quite sceptical of this, even in those most halcyon of times. She declares, perhaps with the luxury of hindsight: “I knew where the world was going and that it was going to be a tough gig.”
Faith will be showing at Spazju Kreattiv, Valletta, until January 31. For more information, log on to www.kreattivita.org.
Filfla (2003)