In the second edition of his definitive book on the steelband, The Illustrated Story of Pan, author Kim Johnson increases the page count by just 12, but the work feels more expansive than the first edition, which I recall only from flipping through it soon after its first publication.
This work is immediately more engaging. Johnson has used his pages to excellent effect and the design of the spreads, credited to the author and artist Ayo Ledgerwood, delivers an effective mix of first-person quotations, big photographs and the historical text that knits them together.
The book is the result of decades of research into the history of the steelband’s development, which began as more than 100 articles on pan written by Johnson when he was at the Sunday Express in the 1990s. Editor Lennox Grant had endorsed the “investment in shoe-leather,” as he put it at the time, that gathering these stories demanded.
Johnson began scanning the photos his subjects and others showed and sent him and eventually gathered a collection of more than 3,500 photos related to the development of the steelband. Less than a tenth of them are included in the book, all strategically chosen to echo and amplify the words they are framed by.
As photographs, they are, individually, unimpressive, hardly first choice for a coffee-table book driven by photography. Most were captured by tangentially interested observers and are, in the most accurate use of the term, snapshots. They lack sharpness and tonal range – but deliver a direct and intimate discovery with their subject matter.
Their true power is as a curated collection, the individual frames piecing together a wide-ranging collage that brings sight to the emergence of art from Carnival’s chaos of camaraderie.
[caption id="attachment_888697" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Kim Johnson, photographed at his Fort George home. Photo by Mark Lyndersay. -[/caption]
The result is what Johnson describes as “a family album,” a collection of photos and stories that read like a forgotten ancestral story, populated by people we kind of know, telling a story that is both familiar and new. There is something transcendent about this collection of images, an alchemy of arbitrary snaps, group portraits, documentary images, touristy fantasy and posed promotional images.
The photographers are also, for the most part, anonymous. Their names and intersections with the people and places pictured lost to time and fragile memory. Those who are identified include Franklin Barrett, a US Navy serviceman posted to Trinidad, the actor/singer Edric Connor, Commander Jack Williams and others with the mix of curiosity and equipment who turned their lenses on the scrappy and evolving Carnival celebration.
Some of the very earliest photos are little more than postcards, culture recorded in the service of exotica.
On first skimming through the work, what jumps out is the enormous scale of its component parts. This is an artful merging of all the resources Johnson collected into a work that hammers a piton of au
