July/ August 2006, p 22

Trinidad Carnival: Photographs by Jeffrey Chock with text by Tony Hall, Hélène  Bellour, Samuel Kinser, Karmenlara Seidman and Kim Johnson (Medianet, ISBN 976951374-1, 190 pp)

Trinidad Carnival is essentially ephemeral.  For two glorious, riotous days the streets are filled with bodies, colours, music, mud, feathers, voices, human beings transformed into creatures beautiful and ugly, ethereal and terrible, in a communal ritual both sacred and profane.  Then on Ash Wednesday morning the garbage and broken pieces of costumes are carted away, and what survives are memories – and photographs.

The Caribbean Review of Books, Vol. 9, August 2006

By Mark Lyndersay

Jeffrey Chock’s book of Carnival photographs is an important installment in the sparse image chronicles of Trinidad and Tobago and that’s exactly why it’s so irritating to have to note that it’s also a disappointment.  Chock’s work is excellent, a vivid, intimate record of Trinidad Carnival’s energy, colour, and human engagement, but the book is undercut on too many pages by issues of pre-press and reproduction quality that put an unwelcome screen between the viewer and the immersive experience that the photographer worked so hard to convey.

It would be disingenuous of me not to note that I am also a photographer, one who has traversed some of the same streets as Chock, sometimes in parallel with him.  I have also had a book of photographs published on quite different subject matter with quite similar results, the gap between what I shot and what rolled off the presses being so large as to be depressing.