From the pit
Most people who go to Carnival never see J'ouvert, because it happens before the sun does. The word comes from the French for daybreak — jour ouvert, the opening of the day — and that is exactly what it is: the start of Carnival, played out in the dark with paint, powder, oil, and a moving wall of bodies coming through the streets with the bass leading the way. On the morning of August 29, 2026, Jab Family Boston and Secret Soca Society brought it through Boston, and I shot it start to finish as the light came up. The oil is not decoration. It is the tradition, the direct line back to molasses and cane ash and the first J'ouvert mornings after emancipation in 1834, when freed people took the word the slavers used against them and played it back at them. Kyron Cruickshank of Jab Family Boston is credited as the first man to bring oil on the road here, so that players in Boston could cover themselves the real way. Shooting it is its own assignment: it is 5 a.m. and near-black, you work with whatever the trucks throw, you keep the powder and oil off the glass, and you wait for the frames where the paint and the first light land at the same time. By the time the sun cleared the rooftops the street was a smear of blue and yellow and chocolate brown, everyone in it looking like they were made from the same tin of paint. This is the foundation the whole Carnival day stands on.
Words & photography — Bobby Shakes