Afflicted Yard

The website Peter Dean Rickards launched in October 1999 with Ainsley Weir, recorded elsewhere as Ainsworth Weir, a discrepancy this archive has not resolved — and one of the first places Kingston photographed itself for an internet audience.

Afflicted Yard used early livestreaming and Rickards' photography to show sound systems, street dances and everyday life in communities the tourist industry preferred to crop out. It predates the camera-phone era entirely: in 1999 the idea that a Jamaican street dance could be watched online, from Kingston, by anyone, was not obvious. The print companion FIRST followed in 2004, made with Ross Sheil.

The site's work is scattered now and the domain has passed out of the project's hands, which makes it a preservation priority rather than a settled record.