Contributed | Twenty Years Behind the Camera: Watching a Country Tell Its Own Story

In the summer of 2006, I was a college intern at TCI New Media Network, a government media company that had just been formed. Its job was simple on paper: cover government events and produce content that showed the public what the administration was accomplishing.

André Kerr

In practice, it put a twenty-year-old with a camera in the middle of rooms most twenty-year-olds rarely enter, standing a few feet from Ministers, close enough to hear them rehearse their remarks before a microphone went live, close enough to notice who was nervous and who wasn't.

At the time, I thought I was learning how to operate a camera. I didn't realize I was also learning to watch a country tell its own story.

That summer didn't make me a political person. It made me someone who happened to be standing very close to politics, which turned out to be something quite different. In the twenty years since, my relationship with election seasons has never been constant.

Some cycles I was fully inside a campaign, filming, embedded, invested in an outcome. Others I stood at a distance, hired for a single event, watching the same season unfold from the outside. I mention this not to explain my politics, but because that movement between proximity and distance is probably the only reason, I feel qualified to say what follows.

This year marks fifty years of ministerial government in the Turks and Caicos Islands. I have called these islands that I love my home for nearly my entire life, but for the past twenty years my work has given me a vantage point that few people experience.

Twenty years is long enough to have filmed the same podium under different administrations, the same national celebrations through several generations of faces in the crowd, and the same chamber while the people occupying it changed, sometimes every few years, sometimes overnight. Along the way, without quite intending to, I learned a few things about this country that I don't think I could have learned any other way.

The first lesson is the most literal. In 2006, we shot on tape. Getting usable footage out of a camera meant physically feeding that tape through a deck, in real time, just to digitize it. A single hour of footage required an hour simply to capture before editing could even begin.

Cameras were heavy. Today, footage is available the moment recording stops. Cameras fit in a jacket pocket. What once required a truck full of equipment and a crew of six can now, in some cases, be accomplished by one person with a backpack. The technical barrier that once stood between an idea and a broadcast has almost disappeared. The barrier that matters now isn't equipment. It's judgment: what we choose to point the camera at, and why.

I think about that shift whenever I remember the introduction of the new Constitution in 2006 and the swearing in of our first Premier at the Downtown Ball Park in Providenciales on August 9th of that year. It was one of the largest multi-camera productions this country had ever attempted at the time, and we simply did not yet have the local capacity to produce it ourselves. Much of the production crew came from overseas because the expertise required for an event of that scale had not yet been developed here.

Today, several Turks and Caicos-owned production companies, mine among them, are fully capable of producing an event of that size from start to finish using local crews. That isn't a small thing to have witnessed. It means the story of this country's defining moments is increasingly being told by people who actually call these islands home. The second lesson has less to do with equipment and more to do with storytelling.

Every administration I've come to realize has to be told differently. The story of 2006–2009 was not the story of 2012, which was not the story of 2016, and is not the story being written today. Every government has its own rhythm, its own relationship with the public, and its own understanding of what it hopes history will remember.

Part of the work has been learning how to tell each story honestly rather than forcing every administration into the same visual language. That adaptability has probably taught me more about leadership than anything else I've done.

There's another part of this work the public rarely sees. Sometimes, while preparing someone for a broadcast or a major address, you stop being a camera operator and become something closer to a coach. You help with pacing, delivery, and the subtle difference between reading a speech and actually speaking to people. You watch someone go from stiff and uncertain during rehearsal to genuinely present by the time the camera light comes on.

Over the years, I've done this more times than I could possibly count. It has left me with one enduring belief: most people in public life are far less certain of themselves than they appear on television. Much of what we interpret as natural confidence is often the result of preparation, encouragement, and someone quietly helping another person become the version of themselves that the moment demands.

The room, however, always outlasts the people in it.

Over these two decades, I've watched leaders rise and fall, Premiers resign, and even a constitution suspended, moments that each felt as though they might mark the end of something significant.

Yet every time, democracy did what a young tree does after a hurricane strips it bare: it grew back. That has taught me that no leader, however popular, experienced, or gifted, remains forever. Institutions do. The podium remains. The flag remains. The room remains. People occupy those spaces only for a time before making room for those who come next.

But institutions only outlast people if someone preserves their story.

That is the part of these past fifty years that troubles me most.

TCI New Media Network, where I began my career in 2006, no longer exists. Much of the visual record it created is now difficult to locate. I've searched for footage from the years 2006 to 2009, a genuinely consequential period in our political history, including the introduction of the new Constitution, and much of it is surprisingly difficult to find, if it can be found at all.

Since then, other news organizations have also closed their doors, and with each closure another piece of our visual history has quietly become harder to access.

We are, right now, in a moment where less of our story is being reliably preserved than at almost any point since I began this work, even though the technology to do so has never been easier or cheaper to use.

That is not a comfortable thing for someone who has spent twenty years believing this footage matters.

A country that cannot show its children what its own history looked like gradually loses the ability to argue honestly with its own memory. Eventually, the past becomes whatever the loudest voice in the room says it was, because there's no tape left to check it against.

Fifty years is a long time to have kept the record of a nation. It is also, I've come to believe, only the beginning.

I don't know what the next fifty years will look like, or what the equivalent of a tape deck will be when another twenty year old finds themselves standing where I once stood, camera in hand, unaware of what they were about to spend two decades doing.

But I know this.

The tools will continue to change. Technology will continue to evolve. The way we tell our country's story will continue to adapt.

And somewhere behind a camera, someone new will be helping another generation find its voice. Our democracy will always need leaders. It will always need citizens.

And it will always need people willing to ensure that what happens today is not lost to those who come after. The story keeps needing tellers. It always has.

André Kerr is the founder of Spotlight Communications Ltd., a creative agency based in the Turks and Caicos Islands. For more than twenty years, he has used the power of visual storytelling to document the people, places, culture, history and defining moments of the Turks and Caicos Islands, sharing its story with audiences at home and around the world. His work is driven by a passion for preserving the nation’s visual history through a distinctly local lens.