Black Ark by Lee Scratch Perry

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“Black Ark” begins with a close inventory of photographs and writings made in spring 2021 at Black Ark Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, where Lee “Scratch” Perry (1936–2021) produced music from 1973 onward. A key pioneer of dub, Perry helped shape a subgenre of reggae built on sampling, looping, remixing, and the use of reverb and echo to transform existing recordings into new works.

More than a recording space, Black Ark was one of dub’s key birthplaces and a living artwork in constant change. Murals, drawings, and dense assemblages of records, instruments, found objects, posters, clippings, and altered books accumulated over time, fusing with the building and its furniture and reflecting Perry’s biography and persona.

The book documents this singular world as it faces disappearance, following the recent sale of the premises, and pairs the new studio photographs with documentary stills and archival images. Conceived with Perry in its early stages, it draws on collage in both structure and materials, and uses the idea of the “house” as a guiding thread—from Black Ark as a “spiritual yard” within the African diaspora to archeomusicological perspectives—supported by extended captions from Perry’s biographer.