By THEA RUTHERFORD,Guardian National Correspondent,thea@nasguard.com

The sky is placid, spotted by powder puffs of white clouds. There's a sailboat in the distance and another in the foreground, heeled over. The men aboard the boat tug ferociously at thick twined ropes, their bodies arced in arrows pointed toward the sky as they slide with their vessel.

It's regatta time, 1954. And the black and white photo takes veteran Bahamian photographer Roland Rose back to the most awkward position he's ever flattened himself in to get that magical shot. Rose took the photo while lying in the cabin of the boat. He lost his camera that day.

"When they heeled over ... the bottom of the sail was actually in the water ... and of course all that water comes down in the middle of the boat all over me and my camera," Rose remembered.

The shot isn't one that viewers will see at "Motion and Emotion," the exhibition Rose and fellow photographer Fleur Melvill-Gardner will hold at the Central Bank on January 11 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. But it does show the motion, the movement, the emotion and the soul that the photos of the exhibit do.

In Motion and Emotion, a show that combines Rose and Melvill-Gardner's platter of photographed faces, objects and feelings from around The Bahamas and the world, cultures blend rather than collide.

Rose's photographs are of scenes and people in The Bahamas, while Melvill-Gardner's photographs include scenes and people in The Bahamas as well as Ethiopia, Yemen, Thailand, Turkey and Antigua.

The photographs in the show depict four main subjects - speed, portraits/faces (depending on which one of the photographers you're talking to. "I call them portraits, you call them faces," Melvill-Gardner laughed to Rose), ceremonies and funerals.

"What I'm trying to do is match, if I can match with Roland Rose's photographs, to show that in other parts of the world things happen very similar," said Melvill-Gardner.

The exhibition is a study of life in black and white splashed with color, as Rose's black and white photos partner with Melvill-Gardner's color shots.

The duo and their work were brought together six months ago at the office of Diane Phillips and Associates, where they both routinely submit work. They discovered similarities in their photographs, a mutual attraction to particular subjects. Motion and Emotion was the natural result.

Both photographers hope the show will be something different. "There are lots of art shows here but very few photographic," said Rose. "We're relatively unique in this respect we hope."

The show is Rose's fifth but Melvill-Gardner's first. "Roland is very well known here in The Bahamas, I'm not. I'm the new kid on the block."

Together Melvill-Gardner, the hot-shot "new kid," and Rose, The Bahamas' "dean of photography" whose photos have proudly chronicled the country's history for decades, will exhibit nearly a century of photographs for the public.

"Ninety years of photography," Rose smiled. "That's a good line."