McQueen’s images make a gentle first impression. Flame lilies, wax mallows, and parrot’s beak flowers grow along roadsides or inside gardens. But the flowers also carry the dense weight of Grenada’s past. “These plants are witnesses to history,” he said. “The flowers are the constant in this land of flux.”

That history is one of layered migrations and violent upheaval. The island was first inhabited by Indigenous Arawak peoples, who were later displaced by Caribs before European colonization began in the 17th century. The French, then the British, fought for control of the land, establishing plantation economies in Grenada built on enslaved African labor. After the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, indentured laborers arrived from India and other parts of Asia. 

Over centuries, the island became a crossroads of empire and diaspora where Indigenous, African, European, and Asian histories converged on a small stretch of Caribbean land. “The West Indies has always been a place of flux,” McQueen said. “All these worlds met in this one territory.” 

His own entry point into that history came through a project called Caribs’ Leap, which took him to Sauteurs in northern Grenada. The site marks a devastating moment in 1650 when Indigenous Carib people, facing defeat by French colonizers, leapt from the cliffs rather than surrender. 

“There are countless atrocities that come with colonialism and the disempowerment of a people,” McQueen said. “But what was interesting for me [during this trip to Grenada] were the flowers. I imagine an Arawak, a Carib, a European, an African would each have looked at those same plants and experienced a moment of wonder.”

McQueen has been returning to the afterlives of empire for much of his career as a filmmaker and artist. In directing 12 Years a Slave, which won three Academy Awards including Best Picture, he traced the brutal architecture of slavery through one man’s experience of captivity. In Small Axe, his film anthology about London’s West Indian community, McQueen turned to the everyday realities of racism, migration, resistance, and belonging in postwar Britain. And in “Resistance,” the exhibition he curated at Turner Contemporary last year, he brought together works that examined anticolonial struggle and the many forms power takes. 

Bounty belongs to that same wider inquiry, but approaches it through a different register. Flowers, plants, trees, and rocks carry a duration that exceeds the timescale of nations and empires. They decenter the human, and with it the colonial habit of treating land as property or resource. Instead, they return us to a deeper temporal frame, one in which human life appears as part of a longer, shared planetary story. 

That shift in perspective can root people more fully in the world they inhabit, and with it comes a sharper sense of what deserves care and value. It also makes room for reverence. As McQueen put it, “These flowers are some of the most beautiful things you could think of. But they serve no purpose—they are there to be admired, to be looked at, to reproduce, to wither and die, and to come again. The promise of renewal. That’s it.”

That’s not to say their beauty is apolitical. It is inseparable from the land they grow in, and from the human histories that land has carried. “The only thing I could think of was to photograph them in their natural environment,” McQueen said. “The context, the land, the soil were very important.”

That decision marked an intentional departure from the tradition of botanical archives, which tend to isolate plants from the systems they belong to. McQueen spent time researching plant collections at Kew Gardens in London, where centuries of imperial botanical exploration are stored in cabinets and folders. Pressed flowers and branches from voyages dating back to Captain Cook lie flattened on paper sheets. “It was extraordinary to see these things,” he said. “There was something very analytical, something very formal about them. There was that kind of sterile categorization.” 

In that setting, the specimen becomes an object of study first, a living presence second. For McQueen, the plants needed their landscape. “They had to be in context.”

That commitment to holding beauty and history in the same frame is how Bounty places emotional climate storytelling at its center. In these photographs, the flowers become part of a larger story about land and liberation. They bloom alongside histories of colonial exploitation and revolutionary aspiration. And they remain in place as human systems rise and fall. 

“Just because you feel that it looks innocent doesn’t mean that it is,” he said. “Nothing’s innocent. A flower in a vase, a half-cut orange, a presentation of food. Nothing’s innocent. It’s all about a certain kind of framing, and who is framing it. Once you go outside that frame and you put the context in—that’s when you begin to understand what you’re really looking at.”

This is the deeper achievement of Bounty. The book slows the viewer down long enough to see flowers as part of a longer record of land and its politics. They are lush, radiant, and fleeting. They are also among the few presences that have remained as generations of people arrived, were displaced, enslaved, colonized, resisted, and rebuilt their lives. “They were witnesses,” McQueen reiterated. “They still are.”