Freemasonry in the Haitian Imaginary
by Leah Gordon and Katherine Smith
Freemasonry in the Haitian Imaginary is a groundbreaking collaboration between scholar Katherine Smith (ed.) and photographer Leah Gordon, unveiling one of Haiti’s most intricate symbolic worlds. Bringing together rigorous research and revelatory imagery, the book shows how Freemasonry became woven into Haiti’s revolutionary origins, political imagination, and spiritual life — not as a European import but as both a universal brotherhood and a tradition transformed and made distinctly Haitian.
Smith’s introduction traces how Enlightenment ideals traveled through the Caribbean and were reshaped by free people of colour, political leaders, and ritual practitioners. She shows how Masonic symbols — columns, compasses, the all-seeing eye — became signs of belonging, aspiration, and spiritual potency. Gordon’s photographs deepen this understanding, revealing a living symbolic ecology: temple doors, embroidered aprons, carved emblems, and vernacular architecture where Masonic imagery appears in forms both familiar and wholly reimagined.
Additional contributions by Dr. Henrik Bogdan, Dr. Gaétan Mentor (introducing the concept of the “Black Janus”), and Smith’s intimate conversations with artist and Freemason Ernst Dominique expand the journey into the realms of history, Vodou, political struggle, visionary experience, and the craft of sacred objects.
Presented in an elegant, large 24 × 30 cm format, this volume stands as both a major scholarly contribution and a striking aesthetic object — essential for readers seeking to understand Haiti beyond familiar narratives, through the powerful symbols that continue to shape its community, history, and spirit.
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Includes more than 170 full-page colour and black/white photographs and illustrations.
Fine Hardcover Edition - Limited to 735 copies
320 pages. Bound in high quality carmine red fine cloth, manufactured in Germany. Features a printed and embossed cover, lettering on rounded spine. Printed on premium 170gsm wood-free silk glossy paper for excellent photo reproduction. Features Peyer Surbalin endpapers, headbands and a ribbon marker.
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About the Authors
Leah Gordon is a British photographer, artist, curator, writer and filmmaker. Her work focuses on Modernism and architecture; the slave trade and industrialisation; and grassroots religious, class and folk histories. 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; on the curatorial team for In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art at the Fowler Museum, UCLA and in 2018 was the co-curator, with Edouard Duval-Carrie, for PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince. In 2015 Leah Gordon was the recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean.
Katherine Smith is a Faculty Fellow in the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. Through extensive ethnographic research, Katherine examines historical transformations of the trickster spirit Gede in the visual and embodied culture of Vodou. Before transferring to NYU, she spent two years at Brown University as a Mellon-Cogut Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies and History of Art and Architecture. She completed her doctorate at UCLA with a dissertation on displacement, death, and regeneration in contemporary Haiti. Katherine’s work has been published in the books Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, Kanaval! Vodou, Politics, and Revolution in the Streets of Haiti, In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art and in the journals Southern Quarterly, e-misférica, and Nova Religio. Katherine has been a part of the curatorial team of two major exhibitions of Haitian art: Reframing Haiti: Art, History, and Performativity at Brown University and In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art at the UCLA Fowler Museum.
