Art of Dancehall is a dazzling documentation of rare forms of global dancehall history – Features

What motivated you to put together this documentation of dancehall imagery?

Basically, I was going through my own collection in my garage and, after spending hours looking at each one and feeling that nostalgia, I thought other people would feel this nostalgia, too. The people who knew about these events and got a chance to experience this era of dancehall in the ’80s and ’90s would feel it. For everyone else, it would be a great way for them to see what this era was like and what made it so incredible and unique, from a visual perspective but also the stories the flyers tell about the events themselves.

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How did you go about curating the imagery featured in the book? What kind of archives were you able to access and what was it like exploring them?

I was already friends with the other flyer collectors whose archives are in the book, and already knew about their collections. Because I’ve been so involved in archiving dancehall, and I am a collector, and collectors know collectors, I’ve had tons of conversations over the last decades with these guys. So when I got into seriously doing the book, I just reached out.

I think the coolest part of this has been seeing flyers for the parties that were my favorite cassettes. Or the flyers for the most impactful sound clashes, where I knew the legends behind the events, but I had never seen the flyer before. Like Kilimanjaro vs King Addies.

Before I collected flyers, I collected tapes of sound clashes. That was a big thing at the time in the ‘90s, if you were plugged into dancehall. Back then, I just got the aftermath of these events, hearing the tapes. And now, with the flyers, I feel I have the complete story. You can see what everyone saw before the event.