90º Degrees of Shade: 100 Years of Photography in The Caribbean

O livro 90º Degrees of Shade: 100 Years of Photography in The Caribbean mostra cem anos de História em imagens, retratando realidades tão diversas como a música calipso, o vudu, o reggae, o tráfego de escravos e o colonialismo, bem como as revoluções e independências, a indústria, o turismo e as diásporas com origens nestes países que viajaram para os Estados Unidos e Inglaterra.

Organizado por Stuart Baker, fundador do Soul Jazz Records, o livro tem prefácio de Paul Gilroy, professor em King's College, investigador das diásporas, autor de The Black Atlantic (1993),There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), Black Britain - A Photographic History (2004), entre outros.

O editor do The Guardian Hugh Muir escreve sobre o livro 

The Haitian drummer from 1950s Port-au-Prince, meanwhile, symbolises the verve and colour you enjoy whenever the Caribbean lets its hair down. The sight of sugar-cane cutters in a field near Le Carbet, Martinique, in 1959 – working in the hot sun, appearing, as such workers often do, overdressed for the task in hand – could have been taken on virtually any island yesterday. Rastafarians in vivid colours chant psalms in Jamaica. Tourists, now the economic lifeblood for many islands, alight from cruise ships in 1970s Saba.

There are harsh realities too. American troops, incongruous during the Reaganite invasion of Grenada in 1983. An armed Tonton Macoute patroller on the streets of Port-au-Prince in 1980. The man poking his handgun through an open car window during the 1965 civil uprising in the Dominican Republic.

Different challenges, different struggles, but recognisable to any child of the Caribbean diaspora. London/Bridgetown, Birmingham/Kingston, Manchester/Port-au-Prince. We are both sides of that coin.

The first time I visited Jamaica was as unnerving as a sci-fi movie

O jornal inglês divulga ainda uma galeria de imagens do livro