SAN­DRA L BLOOD

Trinida­di­an Dex­ter Browne has com­plet­ed his sec­ond cof­fee ta­ble book of pho­tog­ra­phy.

The 400-page his­tor­i­cal pub­li­ca­tion, ti­tled “Haunt­ing­ly Beau­ti­ful Women,” falls with­in the Undis­turbed Cul­ture Se­ries (UCS) and cel­e­brates fem­i­nine beau­ty through im­ages of hun­dreds of the most beau­ti­ful women in the world cap­tured over the last 30 years by pho­tog­ra­ph­er Browne.

Among its high­lights is the de­but of the his­toric first-ever pho­to shoot fea­tur­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go’s three in­ter­na­tion­al pres­tige beau­ty queens pho­tographed to­geth­er — Miss Uni­verse 1977 Janelle “Pen­ny” Com­mis­siong, Miss World 1986 Giselle LaRonde West and Miss Uni­verse 1998 Wendy Fitzwilliam. The three mus­es were grace­ful, play­ful and icon­ic in the im­ages.

The book has cre­at­ed many su­per­stars and house­hold names.

Some glob­al­ly pop­u­lar women have made the list. How­ev­er, in com­pil­ing the book, Browne and his team went one step fur­ther and de­cid­ed to test the the­sis that “Trinidad and To­ba­go has the most beau­ti­ful women in the world.”

Over the pe­ri­od of a year, he pho­tographed some of T&T’s most beau­ti­ful women to place them along­side the in­ter­na­tion­al­ly sanc­tioned di­vas fea­tured in the pub­li­ca­tion.

Apart from Trin­ba­go’s ir­re­sistible mod­els, in­flu­encers, “hot­ties” and nor­mal every­day queens, the book show­cas­es women from around the world whom Browne pho­tographed dur­ing an ex­ten­sive in­ter­na­tion­al ca­reer.

Dur­ing his decade in Los An­ge­les, Browne shot port­fo­lios for Hol­ly­wood ac­tress­es, mod­els, su­per­mod­els, tele­vi­sion hosts and sports­women. He al­so con­stant­ly pho­tographed women through­out his ex­ten­sive trav­els to Asia, the Mid­dle East and Eu­rope.

The book was col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly pro­duced with mul­ti­me­dia artist and his­to­ri­an Rubadiri Vic­tor, who served as writer and lay­out artist. The UCS is a quar­tet of pho­tog­ra­phy books com­posed of un­fil­tered ob­ser­va­tions of dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al sites.

Undis­turbed Cul­ture is one of Browne’s core the­o­ries: “Undis­turbed life of black and brown peo­ple is im­plic­it­ly in­ter­est­ing be­cause of its cre­ativ­i­ty, vi­tal­i­ty, chal­lenges and its in­ter­sec­tion of an­ces­try, re­sis­tance and glob­al­i­sa­tion.”

Browne be­lieves that the au­dio-vi­su­al in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty that can be mined from the every­day lives of these com­mu­ni­ties should be owned by them and is price­less.

The con­cept of Undis­turbed Cul­ture was de­vel­oped by Browne and his But­ter­vi­sion Move­ment, an artist col­lec­tive he found­ed in Los An­ge­les in the late 1990s.

Aligned to his con­cepts, in­clud­ing dig­i­tal de­fi­ance, Browne prop­a­gat­ed re­spec­tive the­o­ries while at­tempt­ing to cre­ate a sov­er­eign black-owned chan­nel of stream­ing con­tent in the shad­ow of Hol­ly­wood.

Oth­er books in the se­ries are Spir­it of the Care­nage Coast, Street, and Undis­turbed LA.