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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle

Kanaval before the earthquake

Kanaval: Kanaval
Leah Gordon wrote the introduction to her book just two weeks before the earthquake hit Haiti, devastating the town of Jacmel, where her pictures were taken
Photograph: PR
Kanaval: Kanaval
Gordon captures the stock characters of the carnival tradition in all their exaggerated grotesqueness, such as the Lasndsetkod, who carry dismembered doll parts
Photograph: Leah Gordon. Courtesy of Soul Jazz Records Publishing./PR
Kanaval: Kanaval
Every year, in Jacmel's pre-Lent Mardi Gras celebrations, the performers act out the nation's history and culture in a mixture of performance, myth-making, and exaggerated spectacle
Photograph: Leah Gordon. Courtesy of Soul Jazz Records Publishing/PR
Kanaval: Kanaval
Gordon often convinced performers to leave the main procession for a moment and follow her down a side street for what might be called a performance portrait
Photograph: Leah Gordon. Courtesy of Soul Jazz Records Publishing/PR
Kanaval: Kanaval
The carnival participants often feature elements of Vodou ritual and scabrous political satire as well as often extraordinarily inventive self-expression
Photograph: Leah Gordon. Courtesy of Soul Jazz Records Publishing/PR
Kanaval: Kanaval
Unlike the carnival festivities in Rio de Janeiro, Jacmel's celebrations are truly weird and often genuinely frightening
Photograph: Leah Gordon. Courtesy of Soul Jazz Records Publishing/PR
Kanaval: Kanaval
Another essayist on Kanaval, Donald Cosentino, has described the celebrations as like 'characters in some commedia dell'arte from hell'
Photograph: Leah Gordon. Courtesy of Soul Jazz Records Publishing/PR
Kanaval: Kanaval
Gordon's images, writes Myron M Beasley, professor of African-American Studies at Bates College, Maine, occupy 'a space between documentation, public memory and the phantasmic theatre of the historic imagination'
Photograph: Leah Gordon/PR
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