Bounty

Steve McQueen is a Turner Prize winner and Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose work across Hunger, 12 Years a Slave, and the Small Axe anthology has made him one of the most discussed artists working in Britain. Bounty is his first dedicated photography book.

In the summer of 2024, McQueen travelled to Grenada, where his father grew up, and photographed the island's plants and flowers. The 47 images in this book are the result: hibiscuses, jungle geraniums, chenille plants, dancing orchids, all shot in vivid, unenhanced colour against the island's lush vegetation. The photographs are gorgeous and they know it. They are also witnesses. These plants have been on Grenada through every phase of its history, through the displacement of its indigenous people, through the cotton and sugar plantation economies run on enslaved African labour, through independence and after. McQueen said in interviews: "Sometimes the most horrific things happen in the most beautiful places." The book holds both realities at once.

The text contributors do serious work. Dionne Brand, the Trinidadian-Canadian poet and author, opens with an essay that reads the Caribbean landscape as a living record of colonial violence and survival. Derek Walcott's poem "The Bounty", an elegy to his mother and to the island's enduring beauty, closes the sequence. The title carries both meanings: the generosity of nature and the bounties paid to slave catchers who brought people from Nigeria and Ghana to work on British-owned plantations.

The design is by Irma Boom. The cover is debossed with a topographic imprint of Grenada's geography, black and white on the outside. Open it and the full-colour photographs follow immediately. McQueen described the intention: "It's almost like braille as you can feel the cover." At 240mm square and 132 pages, the book is a contained object. MACK printed it to the standard that makes that comparison apt.