Review of Trinidad Carnival
31/08/08 09:51 Filed in: Reviews
Trinidad
Carnival
Photographs by Jeffrey Chock
Review by Mark Lyndersay, originally published in the August 2006 issue of the Caribbean Review of Books.
Jeffrey Chock’s book of
Carnival photographs is an important instalment in the sparse image
chronicles of Trinidad and Tobago, and that’s exactly why it’s so
irritating to have to note that it’s also a disappointment.
Chock’s work is excellent, a vivid, intimate record of the Trinidad Carnival’s energy, colour and human engagement, but the book is undercut on too many pages by issues of prepress and reproduction quality that put an unwelcome screen between the viewer and the immersive experience that the photographer worked so hard to convey.
It would be disingenuous of me not to note that I am also a photographer, one who has traversed some of the same streets as Mr Chock, sometimes in parallel with him. I have also had a book of photographs published on quite different subject matter with quite similar results, the gap between what I shot and what rolled off the presses being so large as to be depressing.
Some of the problems with Chock’s images are to be expected. The photographer pushes the limits of both film emulsion and digital sensors to capture images in circumstances that would have been blasted to flatness by a flash or simply left alone by a lesser lensman as too dark. Chock pushes on regardless, capturing in shadowy, grainy blurs the spirit of a Carnival that is shrouded with shadows and lit by slivers of light.
Stickfighters, lit by streetlamps and inadequate flood lamps, blue devils descending from the hills of Paramin at twilight, panmen illuminated by the reflections of the stagelighting from their polished instruments. Sometimes, there is no light on the subjects at all, their ghostly dark outlines rimmed by the ambient light of the street as they stroll into the city for the festival.
Some of these images suffer in two page treatments across spreads the width of the opened book, but that’s understandable. Far less forgiveable are the images of older bands, particularly those of Peter Minshall, which cried out for careful prepress to rescue them from the blown highlights and clogged shadows that leave them muddy and lifeless on the page.
Better, then, to concentrate on the triumphs of Chock’s art which transcend the haphazard and largely uncaring technical treatments that hobble Trinidad Carnival’s impact.
Quite early in the book, there’s an image, spanning pages 28 and 29, of blue devils in Port of Spain. It’s an arresting image, because at a glance, it looks like a military incursion into a densely urban environment. It takes a second, more careful look to see that it’s an organised assault of camouflaged, uniformed men, led by drummers, holding a city at bay with the terrible force of their presence.
This duality of first impact and deeper resonance informs some of the best images in the book, including one of the late Brian Honore, his robber hat backlit like a halo, a wining couple on page 76, which looks like a moment’s advantage until you study the woman’s response, and a spectral character from Minshall’s This is Hell on page 103, apparently neither front nor back, but obviously buying a beverage.
The photographer, so clearly at home with the backwaters of Carnival, the muddy eddies of J’Ouvert, the lewd money gathering of the blue devils and the exhausted people who wash up on the streets of east Port of Spain and Belmont has demonstrably less empathy for the gaudy elements of the festival, offering only perfunctory records of the feathered, beaded flesh parade that’s become the hallmark of the annual wining season.
Trinidad Carnival is a heroic effort from photographer Jeffrey Chock, his passion and intuitive understanding of the humanity that fuels the festival shines on every page. Like most photographic records of Trinidad and Tobago, it’s worth getting while it remains available. No photographic books recording this country ever go into second printings and despite its annoying blemishes, this book deserves a place on your library shelf, not just your coffee table.
Photographs by Jeffrey Chock
Review by Mark Lyndersay, originally published in the August 2006 issue of the Caribbean Review of Books.
Chock’s work is excellent, a vivid, intimate record of the Trinidad Carnival’s energy, colour and human engagement, but the book is undercut on too many pages by issues of prepress and reproduction quality that put an unwelcome screen between the viewer and the immersive experience that the photographer worked so hard to convey.
It would be disingenuous of me not to note that I am also a photographer, one who has traversed some of the same streets as Mr Chock, sometimes in parallel with him. I have also had a book of photographs published on quite different subject matter with quite similar results, the gap between what I shot and what rolled off the presses being so large as to be depressing.
Some of the problems with Chock’s images are to be expected. The photographer pushes the limits of both film emulsion and digital sensors to capture images in circumstances that would have been blasted to flatness by a flash or simply left alone by a lesser lensman as too dark. Chock pushes on regardless, capturing in shadowy, grainy blurs the spirit of a Carnival that is shrouded with shadows and lit by slivers of light.
Stickfighters, lit by streetlamps and inadequate flood lamps, blue devils descending from the hills of Paramin at twilight, panmen illuminated by the reflections of the stagelighting from their polished instruments. Sometimes, there is no light on the subjects at all, their ghostly dark outlines rimmed by the ambient light of the street as they stroll into the city for the festival.
Some of these images suffer in two page treatments across spreads the width of the opened book, but that’s understandable. Far less forgiveable are the images of older bands, particularly those of Peter Minshall, which cried out for careful prepress to rescue them from the blown highlights and clogged shadows that leave them muddy and lifeless on the page.
Better, then, to concentrate on the triumphs of Chock’s art which transcend the haphazard and largely uncaring technical treatments that hobble Trinidad Carnival’s impact.
Quite early in the book, there’s an image, spanning pages 28 and 29, of blue devils in Port of Spain. It’s an arresting image, because at a glance, it looks like a military incursion into a densely urban environment. It takes a second, more careful look to see that it’s an organised assault of camouflaged, uniformed men, led by drummers, holding a city at bay with the terrible force of their presence.
This duality of first impact and deeper resonance informs some of the best images in the book, including one of the late Brian Honore, his robber hat backlit like a halo, a wining couple on page 76, which looks like a moment’s advantage until you study the woman’s response, and a spectral character from Minshall’s This is Hell on page 103, apparently neither front nor back, but obviously buying a beverage.
The photographer, so clearly at home with the backwaters of Carnival, the muddy eddies of J’Ouvert, the lewd money gathering of the blue devils and the exhausted people who wash up on the streets of east Port of Spain and Belmont has demonstrably less empathy for the gaudy elements of the festival, offering only perfunctory records of the feathered, beaded flesh parade that’s become the hallmark of the annual wining season.
Trinidad Carnival is a heroic effort from photographer Jeffrey Chock, his passion and intuitive understanding of the humanity that fuels the festival shines on every page. Like most photographic records of Trinidad and Tobago, it’s worth getting while it remains available. No photographic books recording this country ever go into second printings and despite its annoying blemishes, this book deserves a place on your library shelf, not just your coffee table.
Review of Seasons of Dance
31/08/08 09:44 Filed in: Reviews
Slices
of time
Seasons of Dance
Monica DaSilva
Review by Mark Lyndersay, originally published in the February 2007 issue of the Caribbean Review of Books.
There are some things that
photography is exceptionally good at. Revealing detail and freezing
motion are acknowledged to be among those assets, cataloguing
sequences of fine movements is not.
In the photography of sports, those specialists talk about the “peak” of the action, the moment, in a particular play, when all the elements come together to tell a decisive story about a particular game.
Against that backdrop, then, the photography of dance would seem to be an impossibility. The art of the choreographer does not culminate in a series of friezes, but in a fluent guiding of the human body from one gesture to another, the language of each piece related in the tilt of a head, the swirl of a skirt, the angle of a hip.
Add to the limitations of movements captured in images that last just fractions of a second, the speed of the execution under light which is dramatically contrasty and often inadequate and you have a challenge that’s simply staggering.
Finally, layer into that the judgement of dancers and the intolerance of choreographers for the misinterpretation of their work and you might begin to understand why there are so very few photographers working in dance.
Against all those odds, Monica DaSilva has produced a body of work that is assembled in an engaging monograph of images spanning two decades of Jamaican dance under the title Seasons of Dance.
All the challenges of dance photography are to be found in its pages along with many of the triumphs of the companies she has recorded on film in several hundred images; most of them in richly toned black and white.
The work is organised around six dance companies in Jamaica, roughly sequenced by time and works, so the best images end up scattered throughout the book.
Because the book is so faithful to the work of the artists in front of the lens, the publication includes some images that would not have survived an edit that focused on representing the photographer’s best efforts.
The photographer’s work, in what seems to be a monograph, is overruled by its subject. The decision to balance the representation of the six dance companies leads to uneven representation in the photography, unnecessary repetition of very similar sequences and far too few of the impressive double page spreads that will stop you for some pleasant moments when you crack open those double-trucks.
There are, in particular, several images which are so contrasty that they void all detail, rendering the dancers as white shapes against a black background, a clever style that entertains once or twice but is repeated too often throughout the book.
There are few colour images, and that’s not surprising, since even the faster emulsions of the 1980’s and 1990’s were poorly suited to the bold lighting of the theatre and tended to render colour without subtlety.
The best works are captured in black and white, or more accurately, in a rich palette of grayscale hues rendered with the scattered spray of grain typical of push-processed, high-speed film.
At their best, these images convey electric performances on many stages in Jamaica and in England, dances frozen at the pinnacle of accomplishment forever.
But the underlying schizophrenia of the book’s design makes appreciating the photography difficult. The sequence of the images encourages an appreciation of the evolution of the dance companies, and there’s good fun to be had examining the social clues in the costuming of the same dance over time, but all the pertinent information about the dance performances is sequestered in an almost unreadable block of text at the end of the book that runs on for five pages in unhelpful alphabetical order.
Seasons of Dance is a remarkable work, an unprecedented collection of beautiful images dedicated to a single, thinly examined subject that is enriched by a Caribbean photographer's dedication to craft and to art.
The carpings of this review are really about the faith that should have been placed in the work itself, which can stand with creative independence on its own merits without being cajoled into leaning on the artistic and historic values of its subject.
Seasons of Dance
Monica DaSilva
Review by Mark Lyndersay, originally published in the February 2007 issue of the Caribbean Review of Books.
In the photography of sports, those specialists talk about the “peak” of the action, the moment, in a particular play, when all the elements come together to tell a decisive story about a particular game.
Against that backdrop, then, the photography of dance would seem to be an impossibility. The art of the choreographer does not culminate in a series of friezes, but in a fluent guiding of the human body from one gesture to another, the language of each piece related in the tilt of a head, the swirl of a skirt, the angle of a hip.
Add to the limitations of movements captured in images that last just fractions of a second, the speed of the execution under light which is dramatically contrasty and often inadequate and you have a challenge that’s simply staggering.
Finally, layer into that the judgement of dancers and the intolerance of choreographers for the misinterpretation of their work and you might begin to understand why there are so very few photographers working in dance.
Against all those odds, Monica DaSilva has produced a body of work that is assembled in an engaging monograph of images spanning two decades of Jamaican dance under the title Seasons of Dance.
All the challenges of dance photography are to be found in its pages along with many of the triumphs of the companies she has recorded on film in several hundred images; most of them in richly toned black and white.
The work is organised around six dance companies in Jamaica, roughly sequenced by time and works, so the best images end up scattered throughout the book.
Because the book is so faithful to the work of the artists in front of the lens, the publication includes some images that would not have survived an edit that focused on representing the photographer’s best efforts.
The photographer’s work, in what seems to be a monograph, is overruled by its subject. The decision to balance the representation of the six dance companies leads to uneven representation in the photography, unnecessary repetition of very similar sequences and far too few of the impressive double page spreads that will stop you for some pleasant moments when you crack open those double-trucks.
There are, in particular, several images which are so contrasty that they void all detail, rendering the dancers as white shapes against a black background, a clever style that entertains once or twice but is repeated too often throughout the book.
There are few colour images, and that’s not surprising, since even the faster emulsions of the 1980’s and 1990’s were poorly suited to the bold lighting of the theatre and tended to render colour without subtlety.
The best works are captured in black and white, or more accurately, in a rich palette of grayscale hues rendered with the scattered spray of grain typical of push-processed, high-speed film.
At their best, these images convey electric performances on many stages in Jamaica and in England, dances frozen at the pinnacle of accomplishment forever.
But the underlying schizophrenia of the book’s design makes appreciating the photography difficult. The sequence of the images encourages an appreciation of the evolution of the dance companies, and there’s good fun to be had examining the social clues in the costuming of the same dance over time, but all the pertinent information about the dance performances is sequestered in an almost unreadable block of text at the end of the book that runs on for five pages in unhelpful alphabetical order.
Seasons of Dance is a remarkable work, an unprecedented collection of beautiful images dedicated to a single, thinly examined subject that is enriched by a Caribbean photographer's dedication to craft and to art.
The carpings of this review are really about the faith that should have been placed in the work itself, which can stand with creative independence on its own merits without being cajoled into leaning on the artistic and historic values of its subject.
Review of Days of Wrath
28/07/08 20:11 Filed in: Reviews
Days of
Wrath is Raoul Pantin’s recounting of his experience during the
1990 coup attempt. Read More...
Jazz Artists on the Green, 2008
17/03/08 19:32 Filed in: Reviews
A review
of Jazz Artists on the Green on March 08, 2008 at the UWI Creative
Arts Centre's grounds. Read More...
The state of broadband, T&T
22/10/07 21:23 Filed in: Technology
The
state of the connection. A survey of broadband options currently
available in Trinidad and Tobago some thoughts about where the
market is going. Read More...
San Fernando Jazz Festival
08/10/07 22:36 Filed in: Reviews
A review of the fourth San Fernando
Jazz Festival. Read More...
Internet Campaigning in T&T
25/09/07 00:18 Filed in: Media
Originally planned for an instalment of BitDepth,
this was requested by the Guardian's editor to accompany an
evaluation of the party websites of the UNC, PNM and COP.
Read
More...
The Hardest Knock
03/09/07 01:18 Filed in: Technology
The
Hardest Knock was commissioned as a future vision of how mass media
communications might look in ten year's time. Read
More...
Understanding Noel
25/06/07 19:37 Filed in: Photography
I wrote
this for the UTT for a leaflet distributed at an exhibition held by
the University when they conferred an honorary degree on Trinidad
and Tobago's most senior master photographer. Read More...
Wet wired for the wrong world
07/05/07 16:53 Filed in: Technology
Wet
wired for the wrong world is one of my favorite pieces of
non-BitDepth technology writing.
I dotted the last i on December 29th for this copy, which, along with the cover illustration, was the lead piece in one of three millennium supplements published by the Guardian for the "turn of the century". Read More...
I dotted the last i on December 29th for this copy, which, along with the cover illustration, was the lead piece in one of three millennium supplements published by the Guardian for the "turn of the century". Read More...
Microsoft Dynamics
05/04/07 19:42 Filed in: Technology
Reporting on the launch of Microsoft Dynamics at
Convergence 2007... Read More...
SAUTT
15/10/06 20:08 Filed in: Reporting
The
Special Anti-Crime Unit of Trinidad and Tobago allow this reporter
a view of their daily operations... Read More...