Afrofuturism is a much bandied about genre these days but through Gerald Jenkins’ storied lens it takes on a surreal and intoxicating scale. The renowned UK photographer has long collaborated with Sun Ra’s Arkestra and his vast body of work - spanning fashion, film and portraiture - is informed by his interest in spirituality and global cultures. His in depth study of Australia’s indigenous people for example, speaks to ideas of the eternal present, universal energies and the connection between inner and outer spaces.

Now comes his recently released art book, It’s After the End of the World. Reflecting well over a decade’s worth of passionate exploration, Jenkins describes it as “a picture novel study of the human spirit in the fantastic and magical and the human soul in the metaphorical and physical”. Inside, his expansive photography and collage of all things black and beautiful and out of this realm, live alongside mind-bending texts by the likes of Sun Ra, Kainthepoet, Darius James, Jake-ann Jones and Little Annie.

Here we share the foreword by Norman Douglas:

Here, where globes and their orbits are not circular but oospheres — not just egg forms but energies made pregnant within a certain process freed of the need for what passes for progress;

here, where time and linearity are moot answers to baseless enquiries;

here, where space is produced by men who follow lines they draw across flattened places that never were in space;

here, we locate a road that never goes away, is always there, welcoming.

And here, the artist culls a report to teach us how we learn we have nothing in order to grasp we’ve had everything all along. Together, we are a Black Mass like the breathtaking unknown that surrounds us every night with the unseeable and everyday with the unseen.

Black reveals us as one all-encompassing atmosphere of generic ontology derived from our exposure to everything, unravels the seemingly unbroken web of time and removes the monotony of unlived lives caught in concentric survival strategies.

Black is allergic to the withering costs levied against souls who fear they lack the taste of power.Black feeds our appetite for elemental truths outering from a space of light.

Black casts off the weight of elementary values — where black and white mirror only what’s base and superficial.Black washes away the tiny insults that manifest in lazy memories like the lingchi (“death by a thousand cuts”).

Black susses how persistent ignorance fosters casual cruelties that reflect a ubiquitous scourge of petty one-upmanship and responds with foot- stomping, gut-busting, doubled-over howls of barrelhouse laughter. Black reclaims its totality as easily as the viewer’s mind completes the limitless spectrum of a monochrome photographic print.

Aboriginal mysteries acknowledge our unity as universal, affirm through ritual that our undying participation abides ancient laws contemporary scientists rediscover by observation. Jenkins grasps this process and wonders who else stumbles along this road no one knows how to begin or to end?

Sun Ra explicitly acknowledged the messages transmitted through us via our imaginations and honored these gifts with correspondent harmonies. Sun Ra’s universe is After The End Of The World because its contents are bound to Eternity. Enticed by the potential for saving a world of beings bound to Oppression, Sun Ra meets Angels and Demons at Play and sees how he must play for them (not with them). Rainbows become sonic tonics, cauldrons of spectral gold: Sun, hurrah! Who Ra? His story composes a legend living toward its resurrection, his Mythology is our idealism — post-idolatry. Cosmology is the language of this cosmos we maintain, the lighted breath Sun Ra learned to speak, a language you wouldn’t learn If I Told You. Salvation is not a waiting game, has no textbook; to embrace the infinite, one releases everything to be Whole — this is what Sun Ra found through Discipline decided by listening at the door to Cosmos.

Thus, this book is a tarot for today.

This book is inscribed in wounds that cannot scar the spirit.

This book is a tool to foster awareness of oracle as bibliomancy.

This book predicts its own improvement as necessity.

It’s After the End of the World declares a moment of deep insight — of profound listening — amidst the buzzing alarms and alerts that characterize the status quo.

It’s After the End of the World is a manifestation of the eternally unbreakable reality that casts aside the laws of civilised progress.

It’s After the End of the World represents a milestone for the foreverism of an immeasurable cosmic organism that Sun Ra and the legion of arkestra players in his sungates led Gerald Jenkins to imagine as returned to us.

It’s After the End of the World won’t let you see as others see a cosmos that remains as It ever was.

It’s After the End of the World is After You.

It’s After the End of the World by Gerald Jenkins is published by Art Yard