NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) —A photographer from New York, Tiffany Smith, often makes frequent trips to New Orleans throughout the year. Tiffany Smith is of Caribbean descent and finds identity and beauty in New Orleans being the northernmost Caribbean city. She frequents the New Orleans Museum of Art quite a bit.

Recently, Smith started a series of self-portraits that she calls: For Tropical Girls.

“I was raised partly in the Bahamas until I was nine and then my family moved to Miami and grew up the rest of the time there. My father is Bahamian and Jamaican and my mother is Guyanese and Trinidadian. I think for a lot of people that migrated to different regions from the Caribbean, there are many different stories about how people get here and about how they are accepted, that ultimately changes the entire story of what their experience is when they arrive,” says Smith.

Smith’s photos make her work look effortless but make no mistake, there is a lot of forethought and difficulty in engaging self-portraiture because she has to place herself as both the subject and photographer, all the while, telling a narrative. Tiffany Smith desires to use her photos to be a voice for other people of color, or have roots in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

“It was a difficult process for me to engage and get into character like an actor does. This image represents the moment I moved here from the islands at nine years old. I was packing up my life from the islands and leaving everything I knew. There is idealized idea of the United States that exists outside of this country. I think the realities that we face are totally different from the perception. I’m really interested in making images that contribute to legacy. We need to be more inclusive about what blackness is as a whole and how these influences make what is categorized as black American culture,” says Tiffany Smith.

To learn more about Tiffany Smith’s incredible photography, click here.