Kanaval before the earthquake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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