Alvarez Pupo starts off the series of photos dealing directly with ceremony with pictures of their beginnings — an individual lighting a candle in front of an alter, a woman slipping into a trance state, and a man caught in mid-step while dancing and drumming. While not much preparation, they do give us sufficient warning that something unusual is about to ensue.

It's not until the midpoint of the book that explanatory notes are offered. Written by Mabel Llevat Soy, they give us an explanation of what we have just experienced and what is to come. The second half of the book features photographs which in some ways are even more potent than those in the first.

While the earlier work has some shock element to it, and its power is genuine enough, the second half offers an interpretation of how a believer of Santeria sees the world. These works are therefore the creation solely of the artist, not pictures of actual events. In my mind that makes them more powerful.

According to the notes in the book, the creation story for Santeria has men and women being pulled from the shadows and crawling out from the earth to be first brought to life. So there is life in the shadows of their world, lurking just outside of our vision.

Alvarez Pupo has made phenomenal use of light and shadow to give us a taste of what that must feel like in the mind's eye of a believer. One image that especially stands out for me is just a hand pushing up through grains of sand, but somehow he has made it so that the sand is slowly falling away from the hand and fingers slowly exposing them to the light.

Trance is a unique view of a world few of us have ever experienced. Normally the only time we see Afro-Caribbean religions are the twisted exploitive verions used in movies and sensationalistic novels. Jorge Luis Alvarez Pupo is able to make the real thing far less scary and twice as fascinating, meaning he's a photographer of some talent through his ability to overcome those rather large preconceptions.

As with all titles available through Perceval Press, Trance is half price until June 17, 2007.