‘I put a smoke bomb in a road cone and stuck it on my head’: Delton Barrett’s best photograph

‘It occurred to me that this image looked like someone losing their mind, going ballistic. I tried many shots and was getting tired. Looking back, it’s a wonder I survived’

I grew up on New Providence in the Bahamas, and still live on the south side of the island. After leaving school, I worked with my dad in construction, and that’s where I started taking photos. For the first couple of years, I used my flip phone, playing with images of nature and flowers on the sites we were working on, but in 2010 I bought my first DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera and started teaching myself about photography.

I started doing a lot of landscapes. I tended to shoot at sunrise or sunset, and became interested in taking photos of people in vacant spaces. Because I didn’t have a model, I used a tripod and a timer to include myself in these very fantasy-looking naturescapes.

This shot came about on a day when I woke up feeling I needed to try out something new. I took three or four different outfits to the western part of the island along with a few props, one of which was this cone. I often keep random items I find, sometimes incorporating them into images.

The road I was on leads to a dead end, so cars don’t drive along it much. It was a pretty safe space – I almost felt like I was in my own back yard. I’d been playing with ideas, and putting the cone on my head was the last one I tried that day. I just liked the way it looked but, as you can imagine, it was quite suffocating.

Then I remembered I had a smoke bomb in the car and it just happened to fit into the tip of the cone. Looking back, it’s a wonder I survived. I’d tried many shots and was getting tired. But it occurred to me that this shot really did look like someone losing their mind, going ballistic. The way I’m gripping the cone makes it unclear whether I’m trying to throw it off or hold it on. Perhaps I’m trapped inside, perhaps I’m in there intentionally because there’s something I don’t want to see.

Either way, there’s some kind of struggle happening. Maybe the smoke is giving a signal, calling people nearby for help, like: “Hey, something’s up here!” I call the image Stop the Madness. We pass people every day who give off signs that they are struggling, or not in their right mind. Maybe we walk past, maybe we help.

The island inspires me a lot. It’s the only backdrop I’ve ever really known. In 2024, I went to Madrid, which is highly developed compared to the Bahamas. When I came back to Nassau after, I thought: “Wow, we have so much more colour, so much more green.” I hadn’t really understood that until then. As an artist and photographer, what stimulates me are my surroundings. The beaches are a five-minute drive away – my images tend to have seas or a sunset or some type of bush involved. I use the elements around me to express my ideas.

Some of my images are manipulated to fit the concept or tell the story I want. If I need a seagull to be in a precise spot, for example, I won’t spend all day waiting for that to happen. One of my favourites shows me standing on top of the sea opposite another version of me in a different costume – and our fingers are almost touching, like in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. It’s an image I’d thought about for a long time, so when everything came together it was like a mother who’d waited nine months to have her baby. But often a scene is perfect as it is – all I need to do is frame it and adjust the lighting and maybe the contrast. That’s all that was needed for Stop the Madness.

Born: Manchester, Jamaica, 1991 High point: My first solo show in 2018 at D’Aguilar Art Foundation in Nassau. The Bahamas has been a lasting high point. It set the sail for me to continue to create great images that can inspire others in a way I’d also want to be inspired Top tip: Create what makes you feel. Sit with your ideas and think about them until you’ve found the right way to execute them. We can become so excited in photographing the idea that we miss out the small details that make the image worth taking in the moment. In a nutshell I would say: “Take the pressure off shooting and focus more on what you want to shoot and how you want it to feel”