Alex Smailes & Carnival
25/06/07 20:23 Filed in: Photography
Carnival
It’s the word that launches a thousand pictures.
But finding the picture is even harder than finding these, or any other words to describe it. Carnival is an annual celebration in Trinidad and Tobago, its colourful, heady ferocity long evolved from its roots in religion and colonialism, a national heritage forging ahead with eager abandon even as it looks back in nostalgia.
Finding a frame to bind this festival is as foolhardy as finding an adjective to contain it, but Alex Smailes has tried enthusiastically.
In many of his photographs, the colours are electric. Reds surge like blood, greens drip like acid and the participants of Carnival seem barely contained by the edges of his camera’s frame, hips banging against the edges of the photos, hands reaching up and out.
Every picture of Carnival is a lie, a fictional slice of movement and gesture, stripped of desire and context, removed from the surging throb of music and fevered humanity that drove it, a frozen capful from a people river that has long since moved on.
But gather enough of these little lies and put them together and you begin to see the faintest glimmer of the majesty of the celebration’s nature.
Tens of thousands of people, each on their own mission; whether it is to dance and prance, to pluck a bass guitar or simply to stride down the street, covered in thick, viscous black oil, convene each year at the appointed time and place to recreate something that’s both more than a 150 years old and brand-new every time it happens.
It’s possible to break Carnival out into its component parts.
First come the mas makers, who launch the season into high gear with their vivid, sometimes lurid designs for the masqueraders who will fill the streets.
Then come the musicians and singers, a varied lot who might specialise in soca, the dance music of carnival that provides its heart’s throb, or who might sing the traditional calypso, the witty, sharply observed songs that inform the Carnival mind.
Then there are the people. The Trinidadians and Tobagonians who vote on the popularity of all this music and visual abandon with their enthusiasm and their wallets and set the tone for each year’s celebrations long before a single tourist has set foot on the island.
But, these are the biggest and most obvious manifestations of Carnival, and to single out these boldest weavings is to ignore the hundreds of tiny skeins that make the event so diverse, so rich and so meaningful.
There are the pan tuners, super-specialists who define the collective and individual tone and flavour of the country’s many steelbands. There are the wirebenders who shape the skeletons of huge, often hallucinatory costumes that compete for the title of King and Queen of Carnival.
Behind every Carnival, there are thousands of people you never see. The people who look on at the performances from the sidelines with a quiet smile of satisfaction.
Carnival brings Trinidad and Tobago together, providing the one occasion on which the country moves as one (sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right, left, right, left, right).
At its colourful heart is the surly murk of J’Ouvert, the moment in which the festival begins in earnest and nothing can adequately prepare you for it. There are certainly no hints or warnings built into Carnival’s structure.
In the penultimate moment of a season that begins right after Christmas and comes to a total halt on Ash Wednesday, just as the music is hitting its peak, beautiful costumes have been collected and toned bodies prepared, the dress code is suddenly mud.
Beginning as early as two o’clock in the morning, groups of people in largely uncostumed bands, accompanied by small steelbands or drums and bits of iron stream down into the carnival centres throughout the country. Costumes where they exist are simple, but mostly, they don’t exist at all.
Men don shorts and sometimes diapers, and most revellers swath themselves in rich brown mud or sticky thick black oil that hearkens back to a more primeval vision of Carnival, one in which the mas was tuned into the self and driven by the personal, let everyone who approaches these masqueraders beware.
In a festival that has lasted as long as photography, the forms and styles have become well-known. There is the distant, telephoto shot that compresses masses of costumed masqueraders into a brilliant mosaic of colour. The tight portrait that emphasises the naive art painted on an individual’s face. The joyful smile of a child in the growing “kiddies” carnival, a beatific young face surrounded by dazzling colour.
But even in an event which has been staged and photographed for so long, there is rarely a sense of déja vu. And Alex has added to this palette of styles with cross-processing techniques that take the colours of carnival in acid drenched directions. He’s pointed a wide-angle landscape camera into a horizon of crazed-looking men with demented eyes, bronzed with dried mud as the rising sun looms hopefully in the background, it’s first rays fighting back a stygian dark that’s reluctant to recede.
The photographer was also at a Carnival fete. He was in the street during J’Ouvert seeing things that anyone who’s been immersed in Carnival has seen before. But he has chosen to see it for the first time, and his vision brings fresh revelation to things accepted as commonplace that are really quite extraordinary.
Alex Smailes has recorded a Carnival celebration, but his work acknowledges that this is his interpretation of its enormity. He has been at once truthful (these things happened in front of his lens) and expressive, using lens, angle and film to convey his own reaction to what he has experienced.
This is Carnival, and these are the words that only repeat what you will understand intuitively in the pictures that follow.
Mark Lyndersay is a photographer and writer who has spent 29 years pursuing the elusive sensuality of Carnival. He’s still on the case.
It’s the word that launches a thousand pictures.
But finding the picture is even harder than finding these, or any other words to describe it. Carnival is an annual celebration in Trinidad and Tobago, its colourful, heady ferocity long evolved from its roots in religion and colonialism, a national heritage forging ahead with eager abandon even as it looks back in nostalgia.
Finding a frame to bind this festival is as foolhardy as finding an adjective to contain it, but Alex Smailes has tried enthusiastically.
In many of his photographs, the colours are electric. Reds surge like blood, greens drip like acid and the participants of Carnival seem barely contained by the edges of his camera’s frame, hips banging against the edges of the photos, hands reaching up and out.
Every picture of Carnival is a lie, a fictional slice of movement and gesture, stripped of desire and context, removed from the surging throb of music and fevered humanity that drove it, a frozen capful from a people river that has long since moved on.
But gather enough of these little lies and put them together and you begin to see the faintest glimmer of the majesty of the celebration’s nature.
Tens of thousands of people, each on their own mission; whether it is to dance and prance, to pluck a bass guitar or simply to stride down the street, covered in thick, viscous black oil, convene each year at the appointed time and place to recreate something that’s both more than a 150 years old and brand-new every time it happens.
It’s possible to break Carnival out into its component parts.
First come the mas makers, who launch the season into high gear with their vivid, sometimes lurid designs for the masqueraders who will fill the streets.
Then come the musicians and singers, a varied lot who might specialise in soca, the dance music of carnival that provides its heart’s throb, or who might sing the traditional calypso, the witty, sharply observed songs that inform the Carnival mind.
Then there are the people. The Trinidadians and Tobagonians who vote on the popularity of all this music and visual abandon with their enthusiasm and their wallets and set the tone for each year’s celebrations long before a single tourist has set foot on the island.
But, these are the biggest and most obvious manifestations of Carnival, and to single out these boldest weavings is to ignore the hundreds of tiny skeins that make the event so diverse, so rich and so meaningful.
There are the pan tuners, super-specialists who define the collective and individual tone and flavour of the country’s many steelbands. There are the wirebenders who shape the skeletons of huge, often hallucinatory costumes that compete for the title of King and Queen of Carnival.
Behind every Carnival, there are thousands of people you never see. The people who look on at the performances from the sidelines with a quiet smile of satisfaction.
Carnival brings Trinidad and Tobago together, providing the one occasion on which the country moves as one (sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right, left, right, left, right).
At its colourful heart is the surly murk of J’Ouvert, the moment in which the festival begins in earnest and nothing can adequately prepare you for it. There are certainly no hints or warnings built into Carnival’s structure.
In the penultimate moment of a season that begins right after Christmas and comes to a total halt on Ash Wednesday, just as the music is hitting its peak, beautiful costumes have been collected and toned bodies prepared, the dress code is suddenly mud.
Beginning as early as two o’clock in the morning, groups of people in largely uncostumed bands, accompanied by small steelbands or drums and bits of iron stream down into the carnival centres throughout the country. Costumes where they exist are simple, but mostly, they don’t exist at all.
Men don shorts and sometimes diapers, and most revellers swath themselves in rich brown mud or sticky thick black oil that hearkens back to a more primeval vision of Carnival, one in which the mas was tuned into the self and driven by the personal, let everyone who approaches these masqueraders beware.
In a festival that has lasted as long as photography, the forms and styles have become well-known. There is the distant, telephoto shot that compresses masses of costumed masqueraders into a brilliant mosaic of colour. The tight portrait that emphasises the naive art painted on an individual’s face. The joyful smile of a child in the growing “kiddies” carnival, a beatific young face surrounded by dazzling colour.
But even in an event which has been staged and photographed for so long, there is rarely a sense of déja vu. And Alex has added to this palette of styles with cross-processing techniques that take the colours of carnival in acid drenched directions. He’s pointed a wide-angle landscape camera into a horizon of crazed-looking men with demented eyes, bronzed with dried mud as the rising sun looms hopefully in the background, it’s first rays fighting back a stygian dark that’s reluctant to recede.
The photographer was also at a Carnival fete. He was in the street during J’Ouvert seeing things that anyone who’s been immersed in Carnival has seen before. But he has chosen to see it for the first time, and his vision brings fresh revelation to things accepted as commonplace that are really quite extraordinary.
Alex Smailes has recorded a Carnival celebration, but his work acknowledges that this is his interpretation of its enormity. He has been at once truthful (these things happened in front of his lens) and expressive, using lens, angle and film to convey his own reaction to what he has experienced.
This is Carnival, and these are the words that only repeat what you will understand intuitively in the pictures that follow.
Mark Lyndersay is a photographer and writer who has spent 29 years pursuing the elusive sensuality of Carnival. He’s still on the case.