PhotoBooks Jamaica

With a penchant for adventure, is it no wonder photographer Patrick Cariou--whose first book, Surfers, drew tidal waves of praise--journeyed to Jamaica, a land that he calls "pure madness, and one of the most dangerous places on earth that is not at war." There he entered the secluded world of the Rastafarians, a world, culture, and religion closed to outsiders. Cariou slowly gained their trust, and they began to let him take their picture. With bold black-and-white portraits and landscapes, Cariou indelibly captured the strict, separatist, jungle-dwelling, fruit-of-the-land lifestyle--popularized by reggae legends Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Burning Spear-in never-before--seen images, until now. In Yes Rasta--the phrase spoken by true Rastafari when greeting each other-Cariou's direct, classical photographs reveal men whose style and attitude are as distinctive as their dreadlocks. Men who have left the modern world of Babylon in pursuit of their own independence. Men whose lives are intertwined with the tropical landscape, and whose rituals, symbols, philosophies, religion, medicine, agriculture, family structure, and remarkable strength make the definitive statement of self-reliance.

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Patrick Cariou a portraitist in love with strength. He is drawn to the heroic and the powerful, the men (and it is often men) who seem to represent a fierce independence, who appear to have risen above the compromises society has forced upon the rest of us. He is also an anthropologist. Surfers and Yes Rasta have as much of the ethnography about them as they do the monograph. In order to make the pictures in those books Cariou had to spend many years with his subject in order to gain their trust and for his presence to be sufficiently unobtrusive to permit the degree of candor in the photographs. His subjects are outsiders, a class of humanity to whom Cariou finds himself perpetually drawn. Cariou is a man who enjoys the company of thugs and relishes low life. Thus the rudeboys and outcasts of Trenchtown make natural and compelling subjects for him. The fact that to shoot there is well nigh impossible for a non-resident demonstrates his dedication. For Cariou, to shoot in Trenchtown, which he describes as "the most famous ghetto in the world," was a personal mission. "The womb of all rudeboys," he says, "is Trenchtown."