Photographs captured by Steve McQueen as part of his popular ‘Bounty’ exhibition series have been collated and adapted into a new book collection to be published this month by MACK.
Also titled ‘Bounty’, the book will feature all 47 images from the exhibition, which was based around meditative photos McQueen took of the beautiful flora native to the Caribbean island of Grenada, where the artist-filmmaker has ancestry.
Taken on a trip to the island in the summer of 2024, the images serve as a physical representation of the modern world’s contradictions. Despite their beauty, the plants have witnessed the island’s brutal past, from the disappearance of its indigenous people to the violent colonial occupations fueled by the enslavement of Africans people.
“What has been constant in the landscape is the beauty of the flowers. These plants have been a marvel in a landscape traumatized by colonialism and slavery,” McQueen said in a statement at the time of the exhibition. “Sometimes the most horrible things happen in the most beautiful places; it’s perverse.”
The images will be published alongside a new written piece by the writer and poet Dionne Brand. The collection will also include a copy of the late Saint Lucian writer Derek Walcott’s poem ‘The Bounty.’ First published in 1997, the poem is an elegy to Walcott’s mother and served as the central piece of his ninth solo poetry collection, the first book he published after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.
McQueen’s ‘Bounty‘ is published by MACK and will be available in line with his first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, where he has worked and lived for many decades. That exhibition is titled ‘Atlas’ and will run at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg from 21 March 2026 to 30 August 2026.
Check out some of the images from ‘Bounty’ below.
Steve McQueen, Bounty 8, 2024
Courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Steve McQueen, Bounty 21, 2024
Courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, and Marian Goodman Gallery
Steve McQueen, Bounty 27, 2024
Courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Steve McQueen, Bounty 16, 2024
Courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Steve McQueen, Bounty 2, 2024
Courtesy of the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, and Marian Goodman Gallery.
