Merceline: A Life in Full

2022 - 2025

Merceline: A Life in Full is an intimate photographic chronicle of one woman’s extraordinary ordinary life—Merceline “Mama” Melbourne of Buff Bay, Portland, Jamaica. Spanning 2022 through her funeral in 2025 after passing at 92, this documentation by her grandson, whose return to the family home became both a personal excavation and an act of archival preservation. What began as interviews to capture Mama’s memories evolved into a visual testament to a woman who shaped generations through resilience, discipline, and unwavering self-reliance.

Born in 1932 and raised without access to education or parental support, Mama entered domestic service as a child and eventually became the caretaker of the Buff Bay Resident Magistrate's Courthouse. She independently raised six children in a one-room home with no bathroom or electricity, guided not by aspiration for self-advancement, but by a singular dream—that her children surpass the limitations life had placed on her.

This body of work presents her with dignity, complexity, and unembellished truth: her sharp wit, her unflinching independence, and the pride with which she carried her life’s labor. Through photographs, personal recollections, and family testimony, this project positions Mama not simply as a subject but as a matriarch, storyteller, and an emblem of Caribbean womanhood whose legacy endures beyond the frame.