Dancing with the DJs

Travelling to get married in the Caribbean is these days so commonplace as to be almost a cliché, though not one that involves tying the knot in a poverty-stricken Jamaican inner-city back street with a crude-talking albino entertainer as the unlikely master of ceremonies.

Yet this was what Beth Lesser and her husband David Kingston chose for their nuptials, plighting their troth in the yard of the celebrated singer Sugar Minott, while his Youth Promotion sound system rocked the local architecture to its breeze-block foundations and the extraordinary DJ King Yellowman held forth on the mic. It may not have been the wedding that Lesser had imagined as a girl but it seems appropriate for someone who spent more than a decade chronicling the rise of the cultural phenomenon known as dancehall.

Though younger music fans might assume this subset of reggae culture to be a recent movement, dancehall's origins go back to the early 1950s, when Jamaican music promoters such as Coxsone Dodd strung up mobile sound systems to play records to the public. The culture reached a golden age in the late Seventies and Eighties, a period when Jamaica itself was an island rife with politically-driven violence, and Lesser, through her photographs, has captured the spirit of the era in a new book, Dancehall: the Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture.

So here we see a moody Gregory Isaacs, belt hanging undone, spliff fired up, posing outside his African Museum record store. There's the great producer Henry "Junjo" Lawes, later to be murdered on London's streets, sharing an army truck with a couple of soldiers, while his compadre theatrically aims an automatic weapon at Lesser's camera. Yellowman is shown in his fatigues and the gap-toothed Minott grins for the photographer in the dusty backyard in where Lesser got hitched.

The shots in the zinc-fence jungle of downtown Kingston portray a time before cheap imported clothes from America, when children went without shoes and the sartorial ingenuity of the populace was tested to the utmost. These were the days before ubiquitous fast food and the subjects of Lesser's pictures have a leanness which places them in another time.

Yet everywhere the creativity shines through, the energy which enabled a Caribbean island to become a musical powerhouse with a global reach and the emergence of vocal and DJing styles that were influential in the US hip-hop culture.

How Lesser came to be in Kingston compiling her extraordinary dancehall portfolio is an odd tale indeed. A native New Yorker she was living in Toronto with David when the two young music fans – unimpressed with the pop music of the time – developed a fascination with a Jamaican musician whose work they had stumbled across, the multi-instrumentalist Augustus Pablo. After writing to Pablo they produced a fanzine in his honour and, in 1981, went to visit him in Jamaica. Pitching up in the politically charged environment of Kingston, they soon discovered there was more to the island's creativity than the dub of Pablo, who urged them to listen to other sounds.

"We just thought: 'Wow, there's all this music we didn't know about,' and we found out about all these live dances," recalls Lesser. Their first experience of dancehall was at a session by the Gemini sound system at Skateland, Kingston's roller skating arena. "Being there at the time it was just fun. We would get in a bus to go to the dance and the singers and performers would play for a three-hour set. My husband would have a couple of beers and I would have a grapefruit drink called Ting."

Intoxicated by the culture, Kingston became their only holiday destination. Throughout the Eighties, twice a year, for three weeks at time, they immersed themselves in dancehall. They spent time with all the great sound systems, King Jammy's Superpower, Black Scorpio, Stur Mars, Lawes's Volcano. Many had their own recording studios, where the artists lounged around hoping for an opportunity. The pair from Toronto hung out too, using their holidays to gather interviews and pictures for their growing fanzine Reggae Quarterly.

Lesser admits that her photographic training had been minimal. "Nobody took us seriously. No one official would talk to us," she says, recalling how the couple were "run out" of Bob Marley's Tuff Gong headquarters by an angry secretary and given similar short shrift by Bunny Wailer. "That's why we interviewed all the dancehall people and that's why we ended up hanging around King Jammy's and Youth Promotion."

Not that Lesser was greatly perturbed at missing out on a visit to Tuff Gong. She preferred the fast-paced delivery of the "deejays", the rappers of the Jamaican dancehalls, to the rock and pop influenced sound of the island's greatest musical icon. "I was never a Bob Marley fan. I liked the DJs of dancehall. To lots of North Americans and Europeans there's something very appealing about the DJ stuff – it's the rhythmic aspect and the language that's used," she says, referring to the heavy patois favoured by such artists. One of her favourite DJs is Prince Jazzbo ("he's a nice guy and a character"), whom she has photographed in front of a speaker box, wearing a three-piece pin-striped suit and brimmed hat in the unforgiving Jamaican sun.

To appreciate the music of modern dancehall artists such as Sean Paul or Beenie Man, it helps to see Lesser's images of the earlier years, her shots of DJs like the rotund Nicodemus or the gruff-voiced Burro Banton, furiously chatting over a rhythm track of spinning vinyl as they stand beneath a low-hanging corrugated iron roof and their crew look on, nursing cold bottles of Heineken.

Dancehall has come to be much maligned, especially in the past 15 years, as violent lyrical content has frequently had the upper hand over the party spirit. But in the words that accompany her photographs, Lesser, 55, shows a deep understanding and sympathy with the culture, acknowledging the social and economic circumstances from which it grew. "Everybody that we met down there is an original," she says of the levels of creativity she encountered. "There are no two people alike down there."

'Dancehall: The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture' by Beth Lesser is published by Soul Jazz Records Publishing on 24 November, priced £19.99; www.souljazzrecords.co.uk