AS TOLD TO BC PIRES

I’m Mark Lyndersay and I have been doing the photographs for Trini to the Bone since it (first) appeared in Newsday in January 2019.

I’m a St James boy. I’ve lived in Connecticut, Belmont and Woodbrook, but I’m back in St James for the last three decades. Navel-string thing.

Most of my childhood was my maternal grandfather, mother and two sisters. There were some satellite aunts, uncles and cousins, but it was really just the four of us.

Twenty-three years ago, I married the wife I didn’t know I desperately needed. Donna is the best. She makes sense.

I went to my grandfather’s private preschool in Belmont, then Tranquillity Primary, and got yanked out of there to finish primary school at Romilly’s Preparatory. I got a book scholarship to go to Trinity College in Maraval, when it was an orange grove, not “Moka Raton” with the golf course.

My tertiary education is self-directed and ongoing.

I’m a non-practising Presbyterian.

Isn’t the existence of other faiths enough to prove that one’s own faith could not be the “one true way” to God?

What comes next? I worry that we spend too much time fretting about that without paying nearly enough attention to what’s happening now.

I think we would all do better if we worked harder and more sincerely at being humans together in the space we live in.

I think bad things happen to bad people too, as do good things. It’s really about what you do with your experiences. What you learn from them, even when it’s terrible, and what you can do for other people with what you’ve learned from the things that have shaped you.

I am a writer and a photographer. I became the latter because of the former.

When I started as a journalist, I’d see things that I wanted to see as images to go along with the story, particularly at Carnival shows. Most times, there was no photographer, because I was a peewat. So I got a camera and started taking my own pictures.

The night came when I was in a room with Michael Jackson and Penny Commissiong, recently crowned Miss Universe and I was the only photographer there.

After that, I was considered a photographer, albeit one who was cheerfully ripped off by Epic Records, who bought prints for PR.

I suppose I’m lucky to be doing the work I would be doing as a hobby if I’d had a more traditional career.

Though luck really has nothing to do with it. You have to work at the thing you love before it will work out for you.

When I do a portrait, I’m encouraging the person to give me something they don’t necessarily want to part with, a bit of honesty about themselves.

For Trini to the Bone, I’d come along after BC did the interviews, sometimes long afterward. The wretch would sometimes send me a one-sentence indication about what the interview was about. Some people he’d never met in person. I had to meet everyone I photographed.

Sometimes they were afraid. Sometimes defensive. Sometimes over-prepared.

The results weren’t always successful. A couple of subjects didn’t like their pictures.

I never blame the