Descendants of Summer

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project © Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project © Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project View all images ↓
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As a Bermudian documentary photographer, I explore Bermuda’s colonial legacy, identity and belonging. Through portraiture and landscape, Descendants of Summer reclaims silenced histories and reflects on what it means to call a place home.

The island of Bermuda, a 21-square-mile archipelago isolated in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, is often seen as a small dot on the map or a picturesque escape - but to me, it is home, memory and inheritance.

As a Bermudian documentary photographer, I am drawn to the quiet truths embedded in the island’s landscape, memories carried across generations and the enduring imprint of colonialism on a place that holds history in its very bones.

"Descendants of Summer" is an ongoing documentary that explores the complexities of identity, belonging, and historical reckoning in Bermuda - an island whose present is inseparable from its past. The title references Bermuda's earliest colonial name, the Summer Isles, and evokes both the warmth of home and the haunting legacy of empire.

Bermuda became the first British colony to legalise slavery in 1616, a history that continues to shape the island’s social fabric through intergenerational trauma, fractured identities and questions of belonging. This work explores the deeper truths held by descendants whose ancestors were forcibly displaced, tracing the impact of history on contemporary life.

As someone born and raised here, I have witnessed how clichés of paradise often disguise facts and undermine collective memory and how small places are overlooked in global narratives. But small does not mean simple. Bermuda's story offers a magnified lens on the enduring structures of colonial power and resistance, gaining a greater understanding of the broader Atlantic world and our interconnected histories.

Through portraiture, landscape, archival material, and oral histories, this work is rooted in collaboration with local elders, historians, cultural groups, and institutions to reclaim, reassess, and preserve narratives that have long been marginalised or whitewashed. The project is not only about confronting the past but also about imagining pathways forward through storytelling, education, and dialogue.

"Descendants of Summer" is, at its core, an act of love for my community. An attempt to hold space for the complicated beauty and pain of what it means to belong to a place shaped by both oppression and resilience. This is a story about Bermuda but also a story about the wider world, how the legacy of history continues to shape our present, and the courage it takes to remember, reflect and rebuild.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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“My name is Ajala Omadele, but before Ajala Omadele, I was Coleman Burchell. The Burchell name comes into my family line through an act of violence. Peter Burchell came to Bermuda by shipwreck. He brought with him an enslaved woman of Pequot and Akan extraction, from Brazil. And as was the custom, Peter raped his chattel and produced the Burchell line." Ajala Nanang Omodele, writer and educator.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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"Our clamours dround in the windes, and the windes in thunder. Prayers might well be in the heart and lips but drowned in the outcries of the officers. A plague upon this howling; they are louder than the weather, or our office." William Strachey's first hand account of the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda in 1609, would be the inspiration for Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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"And yet here, in the frigid basement of the Government Administration Building, the fallacy of my colonial conditioning is laid bare. The names of my kin are so beautifully written with perfect letters that loop and arch and stay within the confines of their assigned rows and columns. A ledger of people as property, as livestock, as currency." Liana Nanang Omodele, multidisciplinary storyteller.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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Ollie Tucker is among the earliest enslaved women in Bermuda to be photographed. She was honoured for her bravery in saving her enslaver’s child from drowning. Her story appears in the 1834 Slave Registry, created to compensate slave owners in the UK. Descendants of both sides of this family would later become important political figures and social activists in Bermuda.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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“My initial feeling was guilt and shame […] that someone in my family had done something so horrendous to another human being. But to be stuck in shame and to retreat into yourself is not productive." Mark Nash, descendant of Captain John Ingham, enslaver of Mary Prince - whose 1831 autobiography helped spark the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1834.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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My father arrived in Bermuda at the age of 13 in the early 1960s. My grandfather, a British Army officer, was brought to the island to serve as the colonial headmaster of an infamous government run Junior Training School on Paget Island in Bermuda. There, so-called ‘troubled’ boys were sent for minor offences, facing a system that reflected the deep racial and colonial divisions of the time.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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A young boy stands proudly over his freshly caught squirrel fish, a common childhood trophy in Bermuda that is easily caught by most fishing enthusiasts due to their abundance. However, fishing populations have plummeted significantly since the 1980s, reflecting a broader decline across the Atlantic. Early colonial records describe an ocean teeming with life and an island untouched by humans.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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“We knew that we were Native Americans, but it wasn't discussed in our family. Bermudians treated St. David’s Islanders cruelly because we were different [...] Many years later, we discovered that there was a Captain who had brought captured Pequots from North America to Bermuda in the 1700's. That's my lineage." Veronica Chameau, artist and member of the St. David's Islander and Native Community.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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A rare Black Barbie doll collected by Bermudian social activist Florenz Maxwell, who helped spearhead the end of segregation in Bermuda through the 1959 Theatre Boycott. She has spent a lifetime gathering Black dolls, reclaiming representation that was denied to her and her generation, affirming Black identity, beauty, and belonging.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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Kymani McNeil at the Somerset Cricket Club during the annual Cup Match Emancipation Celebration. In the years following Emancipation on August 1st, 1834, the Bermuda Friendly Societies would hold a cricket game honouring the date - boycotting the ruling white elite. The game was officiated in 1902, and the holiday has grown into a national celebration lasting four days.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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The Friendly Society, among Bermuda’s earliest mutual aid groups, supported newly emancipated communities. Its treasured heirloom, Noah’s Ark, symbolized renewal and new beginnings. Guided by “In Friendship, Love, and Truth,” members were dedicated to uplifting and serving their community.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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Dr. Michael Bradshaw, historian and former president of the Bermuda Friendly Societies Association - founded in 1832 - is dedicated to preserving its legacy. The Friendly Society played a crucial role in helping formerly enslaved people create new lives for themselves after the abolition of slavery in 1834. The lodges became the schools, churches, and political hubs of the future Bermuda.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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“Once I was on the Nonsuch island, I dreamed up the idea of making this isolated island a living museum of pre-colonial Bermuda - to restore everything that I had learned from my historical research about the original plant and animal inhabitants of Bermuda.” David Wingate OBE, Bermudian naturalist and environmental historian whose work focuses on restoring native and endemic species in Bermuda.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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Three crosses made from Bermuda cedar stand at St. John's AME Church overlooking Harrington Sound. Founded in 1881 as Bermuda’s first AME church, the cedars were lost to a 1950s scale-insect blight. Their remains reflect ecological fragility and the impact of imperialism.

© Nicola Muirhead - Image from the Descendants of Summer photography project
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An office chair is positioned in an alcove of a colonial fortress in the town of St. Georges, founded in 1612. Today, Bermuda's economy is dominated by the insurance and reinsurance sector, making it the leading offshore financial service center in the world. The island is often referred to as a 'tax haven,' boasting the highest GDP per capita in the world, but concentrated amongst a select few.

Descendants of Summer by Nicola Muirhead

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