Jimmie Mannas, Peeping Seawall Beach Boy-Sea Wall, Georgetown, Guyana, 1972

Jimmie Mannas: This is a seawall. And I don’t know if you know anything about Guyana, but this is the seawall. And in Georgetown, or in Guyana, it's like Central Park at 59th Street in Manhattan where Central Park ends on a Sunday afternoon. It runs from Georgetown, docks all the way up the East Coast, all the way. The British built it to keep the floods down.

Narrator: Jimmie Mannas lived in Guyana from 1971 to 1976. He worked for the Ministry of Information, as a photographer and a filmmaker.

Jimmie Mannas: And this photograph here, the little boy, I call him Peeking, he’s peeking and whatnot at me wondering what the hell I’m doing. That’s what it was all about. But he’s so cute, you know, and I had to take a picture of him. But the picture sort of symbolizes my need to be near the seawall and what the seawall represents. The seawall was innocent. I mean a whole lot of people came to do things on the seawall, the East Indians and the Blacks, who were a different political party, didn’t like each other. Or they lived on the same block and didn’t speak to each other. When they came to the seawall all that went by the wayside. They would sit there and talk with each other. They didn’t know what the deal was, you know, politics has to take a little rest every once in a while.