When The Guardian asked Colombian photographer Jair F. Coll to select his single best photograph, he did not reach for a polished studio portrait or a dramatic conflict shot from his assignments for The New York Times or Reuters. He chose an image from a midnight funeral for a child never born – a bunde ritual in the Afro-Colombian community of Quinamayó, in the Valle del Cauca department of southwestern Colombia. The photograph shows two women dancing before a tiny burial casket while children film on their phones in the background. A hand-drawn banner of a smiling angel hangs above. Underneath it, barely visible, are antenatal ultrasound scans of the baby they are mourning.
The Photographer
Jaír F. Coll was born in 1997 in Cali, Colombia, and studied communications at the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente, later attending a workshop at the International Center of Photography. He spent three years as a staff reporter for the Colombian newspaper El País before transitioning to freelance work for international outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Reuters, NPR, and Open Society Foundations. His work centres on how culture and spirituality shape life in marginalised communities, with a particular focus on Afro-Colombian and displaced populations.
His accolades include the VII POY Latam award, the Everyday Projects Grant 2023, the LensCulture Emerging Talent Award 2023, the Sony Photography Award, the Alfonso Bonilla Aragón Award for Best Photography (2018), and the Simón Bolívar National Journalism Award in 2024. His photographs have been exhibited at Photo Vogue Festival in Milan (2021), Photoville in Brooklyn (2022 and 2025), and the New York Portfolio Review (ninth edition). In 2025, his reporting on Medellín for National Geographic was named among the “Best of the World.”
The Ritual
Quinamayó is a palenque – a settlement founded by Africans who escaped enslavement before Colombia abolished slavery in 1851. Located roughly ninety minutes south of Cali near Jamundí, the community preserves a tradition unique in Colombia: Christmas celebrated in mid-February, forty-five days after the standard date. This timing represents the period the Virgin Mary rested after giving birth, and it originated because enslaved people were forbidden from participating in their owners’ December festivities. The tradition, now more than 150 years old, has been recognised as part of the national cultural heritage.
The bunde is a separate ritual, distinct from the Christmas celebration. It honours children who die before the age of ten. In Afro-Colombian cosmology, these children are considered completely free of sin – a belief that diverges from mainstream Catholic doctrine on original sin – and their death is understood as a release from earthly suffering, a concept rooted in the era of slavery when the death of a child meant liberation from bondage. The ritual requires that all participants, including musicians and dancers, remain until the child is buried at midnight. According to community tradition, anyone who leaves early will be pursued by the child’s spirit, which may take the form of an animal, an insect, a butterfly, a sound, or an invisible hand.
The Photograph
Coll’s image captures a bunde for a baby named Zoe Fernanda Camacho Aranda, who was lost to miscarriage at four months. The baby’s mother, Jessica, was too unwell to attend and remained inside the house visible in the photograph. The women dancing – Mónica Carabalí and Nazly Paola Ramos – were family friends. The children filming in the background were Jessica’s cousins and nephews. The hand-drawn angel on the banner behind the casket was created by family members, and beneath it, Coll noted, the only photographic evidence of Zoe’s existence had been affixed: her antenatal scans.
Coll described receiving word from the director of Quinamayó’s juga brass band – the ensemble that performs the community’s signature rhythm, a variant of which features dancers shuffling their feet in reference to ancestors who danced in chains – that a child had died and a bunde would take place that evening. He drove ninety minutes from Cali immediately. Having spent years building trust with the community, he was granted access to document the full ceremony, from the initial singing and dancing through to the burial at the cemetery, where children surrounded the casket with candles.
Broader Significance
Coll’s bunde photograph operates on several registers simultaneously. It is a document of an Afro-Colombian ritual that most Colombians outside the community have never witnessed. It is a meditation on how communities shaped by the trauma of slavery construct meaning around death. And it is a challenge to the structural racism that persists throughout Colombia – a country where, according to the 2018 national census, three million people self-identify as Black, though Afro-Colombian organisations estimate the true figure could be three times higher. The same census found that 30 per cent of Afro-Colombians live in multidimensional poverty.
Coll has stated that he wants viewers to feel admiration for Quinamayó’s resilience rather than pity. His work on the community, begun in 2018 and continued through the project Black Baby Jesus Was Born in February, has been published by The New York Times and The Guardian, and exhibited at Photoville, Photo Vogue Festival, and Paris Photo with Polaroid and Magnum in late 2024. The project earned him the LensCulture Emerging Talent Award in 2023.
For Coll, the bunde photograph is his best because it crystallises everything his practice stands for: the insistence that cultural traditions born from resistance deserve the same reverence as any national monument, and that the stories of communities like Quinamayó – founded by people who chose freedom over bondage – are not peripheral to Colombia’s identity but central to it.
