The soul of Hampden Estate in Twenty-Five Author’s Shots

The third edition of the Magnum Series Rum is a true act of love for Hampden, the Jamaican distillery that in recent years has risen to international prominence for its rums of remarkable intensity and aromatic depth. The photographs by Cristina de Middel, outgoing president of the legendary Magnum Photos agency, pay tribute to the history, people, and uniqueness of Hampden. A world apart, within the world of rum.

Elliott Erwitt once said, “The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”

The legendary photographer, who passed away in New York a couple of years ago, was the one who inaugurated the very first edition of the Magnum Series Rum. Conceived by Luca Gargano in 2021, the project was born from the idea of uniting the excellence of fine spirits with the excellence of photographic art - a combination capable, indeed, of explaining things without words.

Looking through the twenty-five photographs displayed under the title The Fragrance of Trelawny at Quai de la Photo, the floating art space on the Seine in Paris last September, just before Whisky Live Paris, it was clear that Cristina de Middel, the Spanish photographer from Alicante whose reports have appeared in El País, The Guardian and The New York Times, had fully hit the mark.

As the outgoing president of Magnum Photos, de Middel was entrusted this year - following Erwitt’s first edition and Alex Webb’s second - with capturing the images that would appear on the four bottles of the third Magnum Series release. For the first time, the photographs were all new, and for the first time, all dedicated to a single distillery: Hampden Estate of Jamaica. A tribute as singular and distinctive as the story of this centuries-old distillery itself.

Founded in 1753, Hampden remained for centuries almost in the shadows, known only to a few aficionados, its production largely destined for use in blends, confectionery, and even perfumery.

Then, in 2009, when ownership passed to the Hussey family, came the first tropical-ageing casks and the first bottlings to bear the Hampden name. Only then did rum lovers discover the sumptuous - at times almost audacious - richness of these spirits, born from sugarcane and crafted with ancestral fermentation and distillation methods, unafraid to draw out the fullest aromatic expression possible.

From this small corner of Trelawny, in the island’s northwestern reaches, Hampden’s rums began to conquer the world. And, it seems, Cristina de Middel’s heart as well.

“I approached Hampden Estate as I often do with my projects: by letting myself be completely overwhelmed at first,” she explained during the Paris vernissage. “Rather than arriving with a preconceived idea, I wanted to fully experience the place - its intensity, its rhythm, its contradictions. Hampden is not just a distillery; it’s a world of its own, with its own rules, its own time, and its own ghosts. My goal wasn’t to impose a gaze but to absorb the atmosphere and translate it visually, aware that every step inside carried with it history, work and tradition.”

Looking at de Middel’s photographs while sipping one of the four Hampden bottlings at 60% ABV, the connection between sight and taste came naturally: the humidity of the lush vegetation surrounding the estate, the light of dawn and dusk, the hum of machinery, the cascade of fermented liquid on its way to the stills, the intoxicating aroma of molasses, and the faces of the men who work at the distillery - genuine faces, workers’ smiles, ancient and serene eyes.

“Photography cannot literally capture a smell or a sound, but it can suggest them,” de Middel said. “I worked with contrasts of light and shadow, with textures, with spatial density. I tried to bring out the sweat on the walls, the haze of steam, the vibration of the barrels, as metaphors for those sensations. My goal wasn’t to document, but to evoke: to let the viewer almost feel the scent of sugarcane and the rumble of the machinery through the image.”

Among the most evocative shots is the avenue flanked by two rows of palms leading to the family estate, behind which stands the distillery itself. De Middel says she took that photo countless times to capture the perfect moment: the right light, the faint mist that rises from the earth at dusk, when the tropical sun’s heat gives way to cooler air.

Those palms, lining the entrance, recall the cypress trees of Bolgheri sung by Giosuè Carducci; because Hampden, as de Middel herself put it, is not merely a rum distillery, but a magical enclave where even the peacocks roaming the estate have become, after some initial shyness, conscious protagonists of her photographs.

Of the twenty-five images displayed at Quai de la Photo, carefully chosen from hundreds of shots, four will grace the labels of the third Magnum Series Rum release.

Four different marks, aged four, seven, eight and nine years - each expressing a facet of Hampden’s richness. But that, of course, is only part of its wealth, for every Hampden rum has a story to tell. Just like the photographs of Cristina de Middel, who chose to portray Hampden Estate “not as an industrial site, but as a living organism.”