The Fragrance of Trelawny

From September 24–28, 2025, Quai de la Photo in Paris hosts the exhibition “The Fragrance of Trelawny,” Cristina De Middel’s sensorial portrayal of Hampden Estate, one of the oldest sugar estates in Jamaica, located in the Trelawny Parish in the northwest of the island.

Magnum’s third collaboration with La Maison & Velier — a joint venture since 2017 between La Maison du Whisky in France and Velier in Italy — presents 25 of De Middel’s photographs, four of which will feature on the bottles of Hampden Estate’s latest series of rum, distilled between 2016 and 2021. 

With almost surreal couplings and surprising contrasts between exterior and interior, De Middel’s photographs evoke the world of Hampden Estate — its large wooden vats used for fermentation, the soft light streaming through the distilling rooms, and Jamaica’s dense, tropical climate. 

“The humidity, the sound of the machinery, and the almost tangible thickness of the air were immediate,” De Middel says, recounting what guided her photographic impulse. “The smell of molasses mixed with time itself, the way the buildings seemed to breathe, and the people moving through it all with gestures that felt both precise and timeless. I wanted to photograph Hampden not as an industrial site but as a living organism.”

For the first collaboration with Magnum in 2021, La Maison & Velier selected black-and-white images by Elliott Erwitt from Magnum’s archives, creating a dialogue between each image and the art of distillation, explains Luca Gargano, head of Velier. The second collaboration featured color images by Alex Webb taken in Trinidad, Haiti, Saint Lucia, and Jamaica, also from the archives.

Now, De Middel’s photographs of Hampden Estate offer a contemporary experience of its people, atmosphere, and processes, which involve artisanal techniques dating back to the 18th century. “Rather than coming with a fixed idea, I wanted to experience the place fully, with its intensity, its rhythm, and its contradictions,” she adds.

“Rum has its brand, its label, its commercial side,” says De Middel, “but behind that there is a culture, a place, and a community. […] I experienced it as an opportunity to show that an image can hold complexity — that Hampden is both tradition and experiment, labor and celebration. The rum is a product, yes, but it is also the condensation of a world, and my task was to make that visible.”

Gargano notes that the exhibition’s title, “The Fragrance of Trelawny,” is in honor of the region and its historical production: “These are high-ester rums, born of unusually long fermentations that yield extraordinary aromas,” he says. 

De Middel’s images bring these distinct olfactory qualities to the fore: “I worked with contrasts of light and shadow, with textures, with the density of the space. I tried to let the sweat on the walls, the fog of steam, and the vibration of the barrels appear in the images as metaphors for those sensations. My aim was not documentation but evocation — to let the viewer almost smell the sugarcane and hear the machinery through the photograph.”

“Hampden is not just a distillery; it is a world with its own rules, its own time, and its own ghosts,” adds De Middel. “My impact was not so much to impose a view but to absorb its atmosphere and then translate it visually, with the awareness that every step inside carried history, labor, and tradition.”

Plan your visit to see the full exhibition at Quai de la Photo here.