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Originally published in 2016, this second expanded edition coincides with an exhibition at The Royal Photographic Society in late 2019, marking the first UK showing of the project. The recipient of the 2016 Bar Tur Photobook Award and shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook, the first edition quickly sold out and appeared on many books of the year lists. Incorporating developments that have taken place within the case following an appeal in 2018 in Iceland’s Supreme Court, this second edition features additional text by expert witness Professor Gisli Gudjónsson CBE, and a foreword by Erla Bolladóttir, one of the six prosecuted. Forty-five years ago in 1974, two men went missing in separate incidents in Southwest Iceland. The facts of their disappearances are scarce, and often mundane. An 18 year old set off from a nightclub, drunk, on a ten kilometre walk home in the depths of Icelandic winter. Some months later, a family man failed to return from a meeting with a mysterious stranger. In another time or place, they might have been logged as missing persons and forgotten by all but family and friends. Instead, the Gudmundur and Geirfinnur case became a notorious unresolved double murder investigation that continues to rock Icelandic society to this day. Latham photographed the places and people that feature in the many varied accounts of what happened to Gudmundur and Geirfinnur after they vanished, resulting in his Sugar Paper Theories project. Spending time with the surviving suspects, as well as whistleblowers, conspiracy theorists, expert witnesses and bystanders to the case, Latham’s photographs and material from the original police investigation files stand in for memories real and constructed. In the 1970s theories about the disappearances fixated on Iceland’s anxieties over smuggling, drugs and alcohol, and the corrupting influence of the outside world. The country’s highest levels of political power were drawn into the plot. Ultimately, a group of young people on the fringes of society became its key protagonists. All made confessions that led to convictions and prison sentences. Yet none could remember what happened on the nights in question. A public inquiry and subsequent appeal uncovered another story, of how hundreds of days and nights in the hands of a brutal and inexperienced criminal justice system eroded the link between suspects’ memories and lived experience. In September 2018 all but one of those prosecuted were acquitted by Iceland’s Supreme Court. The fight to clear the remaining suspect of perjury charges in this heinous crime continues while the real perpetrator(s) has never been caught. Professor Gisli Gudjónsson CBE, a former Reykjavik policeman and forensic psychologist, whose expert testimony and pioneering theory of ‘memory distrust syndrome’ helped free the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, and who was central to the Gudmundor and Geirfinnur inquiry, provides a detailed written account of the case. Updated since the first edition of Sugar Paper Theories, Gudjónsson’s text examines the investigation in light of the subsequent appeal. An introduction by Erla Bolladottir, the only one of the six prosecuted whose charges, for perjury, remain in place, reveals first-hand what it was like to have one’s memories and actions unrepentantly put into question and infiltrated by those whose job it is to supposedly preserve the truth.

‘Before Carnival, you never sleep, always dreaming of bringing pleasure, innovation and creation. ’– Fanel Saint-Helere & Frantz Denoujou (Flanbo Mardi Gras troupe)Leagues away from the sequinned, sanitised, corporate-sponsored carnivals found elsewhere in the Americas, the Madigra troupes of the Haitian port town of Jacmel enact and subvert myth, legends and the nation’s own histories, their improvisational costumes and surreal narratives a Vodou-charged blend of folk memory, political satire and personal revelation. Here the Zèl Maturin, satin-clad devils in papier-mâché masks, hinged wooden wings clapping on their backs, do battle against Sen Michèl Arkanj and his army of pastors; further on the Chaloska in their cows’-tooth-adorned masks transform the feared early twentieth-century police chief Charles Oscar Étienne into a metaphor for the corrupting nature of absolute power. At the crossroads the horned Lanse Kòd, their skin shining blacker than black with a mixture of cane syrup and charcoal, perform press-ups before running amok through the crowds. Meanwhile a trouser-clad donkey, led by the leaf-skirted Atibruno troupe, speaks into a mobile phone and eats fried plantain, to show the world that the peasants are as good as anyone, that all donkeys are important. Here too are lone, idiosyncratic characters: Geralda, the single mother of a starving child, the mermaid-in-disguise Madanm Lasirèn, and Bounda pa Bounda, who plays out a Vodou vision revealed by a treetop-dwelling spirit. Leah Gordon has been photographing Jacmel Carnival and recording oral histories with its participants since 1995. Her photographs in ‘Kanaval’ are stripped of kinesis and exuberance. She uses a sixty-year-old Rolleicord medium-format twin-lens-reflex camera, and shoots onto black and white negative film. The camera is mechanical, and once the film is loaded the shutter has to be physically cocked and the exposure set manually. She always asks permission and pays the participants for the chance to photograph them. A consensual reciprocity between the photographer and the sitter arises which leaves behind the commotion of the street and enters the more tranquil territory of a portrait studio. The time and space created allows for some of the historical narratives of the Madigra to seep through. Leah Gordon (born Ellesmere Port, UK) is an artist, curator, and writer. Her work explores the intervolved and intersectional histories of the Caribbean plantation system, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Enclosure Acts and the creation of the British working-class. Her film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Dak’art Biennale and the National Portrait Gallery, UK. She is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; was a curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; was the co-curator of ‘Kafou: Haiti, History & Art’ at Nottingham Contemporary, UK; and was co-curator of 'PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince' at Pioneer Works, NYC in 2018 and MOCA, Miami in 2019. In 2022 she will be exhibiting and curating at documenta fifteen, Kassel, and is directing a feature-length documentary on Jacmel Carnival for BBC’s Arena. Here Press is delighted to republish Gordon’s Kanaval, eleven years after its first publication, in a revised and expanded second edition which includes many new photographs and oral histories.

‘…and with just a flyer from Steve Bedlam, stating “Hostomice, It’s Out There… The Tekno Travellers’ Holiday Destination Of The Year” as directions, we head off to Europe. ’In 1995 Tom Hunter set off from a squatted street in Hackney with a group of friends in an old double decker bus, loaded with muesli, Sosmix, baby-foot table and a sound system. Fuelled by selling egg butties, veggie burgers and beer, their journey took them through folk festivals in France, teknivals in Czech Republic, hippie gatherings in Austria and beach parties in Spain. Le Crowbar Café became an oasis for a nomadic party community hungry for all night food and a break from the hardcore techno. ‘Le Crowbar’ paints a vivid picture of friends on a journey, exploring new horizons and ways of living on the road, in the wake of the introduction of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.

Rising from London’s Erith marshes in the 1960s, Thamesmead – now home to over 40,000 people – was London County Council’s bold attempt to build a new town to address the city’s housing shortage after the Second World War. Noted for its daring, experimental design – concrete modern terraces, blocks of flats and elevated walkways built around a system of lakes and canals – the town received attention from architects, sociologists and politicians throughout the world but also gained notoriety as the backdrop to Stanley Kubrick’s film, ‘A Clockwork Orange’. In ‘The Town of Tomorrow’, 50 years of Thamesmead’s history have been assembled and preserved. The architecture of the town and its inhabitants are captured by archive material combined with newly commissioned photography by Tara Darby. Original plans, models, postcards, leaflets and newspaper cuttings are presented alongside interviews with local residents. Together with an introductory essay by John Grindrod, the images convey the story of this pioneering town, from the dreams and excitement of its ambitious original vision to the complex realities of living there today.

Nestled within the redwood forests of Monte Rio, northern California, sits Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre retreat owned by the exclusive gentlemen’s San Francisco Bohemian Club, founded in 1872.Every summer, the retreat is frequented by the political and business elite of the US. Shrouded in secrecy, the activities at the grove have become the subject of countless conspiracy theories and rumours.In 2000, Alex Jones, the founder of infowars, broke into the encampment in an attempt to ‘expose the new world order’ and filmed the Cremation of Care, a theatrical ceremony in which an effigy of the members’ 'worldly cares' is burnt.Beyond inspiring a bizarre attack on Bohemian Grove by a masked vigilante calling himself the Phantom Patriot in 2002, the release of the video footage, set within an alarmist context, was instrumental in increasing Jones’ profile as a far-right activist and subsequently springboarded infowars to become an influential outlet of fake news in recent US politics.In 'Parliament of Owls', Jack Latham investigates the effects that a vacuum of information can cause