Trenchtown love

PATRICK CARIOU is 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."
Cariou grew up in a small town near Quimper, in Brittany, far removed from the slums of downtown Kingston. His first aesthetic impulses arose from watching storms gathering over the beach near his home, while still a "romantic adolescent," as he puts it. This fascination with the power and beauty of nature endures in his photography, despite his being considered a portraitist. In Paris, as a young man, he interspersed his fashion work with portraits of the young iconoclasts of the burgeoning hip-hop generation. Surfers was, for Cariou, a smooth introduction into the world of serious documentary portraiture. The challenge was merely to get to the distant locations where serious surfers congregate and to spend time with them. Making photographs in Jamaica was a totally different, far more difficult, frustrating and troubling experience.
Nonetheless, recalls Cariou, the minute he set foot on Jamaican soil in 1996 he felt he belonged there. He says he "knew who was who and what was what; who to talk to, who to walk with, who not to, who was the tough guy, who was acting it." Cariou has always been deeply fascinated by Jamaican culture, with reggae music and the complex set of social, geographical and political factors that created it and that it, in turn, creates. And like those who come to the island with the intention of being more than a mere tourist in the gated resorts at Negril and Ocho Rios, he was faced with the contradictions and problems that plague this beautiful, bountiful, island. And through Yes Rasta and now Trenchtown Love he has offered his response. Thus this book becomes more than merely a portfolio of the exotic, photogenic denizens of Kingston's underbelly. Like many whose involvement with this island runs both deep and intensely personal, Cariou decries the mentality that has made this the most corrupt and the most dangerous island in the Caribbean. Cariou sees in Jamaica's people the conflicts of their history. "A majority of the people of Jamaica are descended from warriors. They have the [strength] of warriors and rebels, but they also inherited the disposition towards egotism, exaggerration and violence."
So Trenchtown Love is not a naïf's ode to stylish, stylized desperation, and the title deliberately contains ambiguities. Just as in Scotland a "Glasgow kiss" is the ironic term for a headbutt to the bridge of the nose, the kind of love shown in Trenchtown is as much about acid thrown in someone's face as it is about building a library, as much about guns and machetes as about bricks and mortar, as much about abnegation of responsibility as overcoming obstacles. This, in the end, is the triumph of Cariou's new book. "I aim to report what I experience, to understand society by the visual."
Cariou explains that both Surfers and Yes Rasta reflected the inspiration he had taken from Paul Strand and August Sander. Yet he felt it was time for a change, and further that his subject matter demanded it. "I felt I'd done my thing on classicism," explains Cariou. "TL was the perfect vehicle to use a more aggressive, modern style. It was necessary to capture the flamboyance of Trenchtown." So Trenchtown Love, Patrick Cariou's first book in "living" color, represents both a new step and retrenchment of his attitudes and beliefs. As he says, he is a portraitist ; he chooses his subjects and does not claim to be simply a reporter. Nonetheless, as Trenchtown Love clearly demonstrates, there is a fierce desire for integrity, accuracy and honesty in Cariou's photography. "It's very important not to betray the people I photograph," he explains. "It's very important that they recognize themselves in the images."

Eddie Brannan