Photography that is not carefully considered can contribute, at times, to the reinforcement of stereotypes frequently applied to developing countries across the globe, from Africa to Latin America to Asia. “As photographers, we tend to go to places with our eyes and brains already full of images, and very often, unfortunately, we try to confirm those images,” says Paolo Woods, who moved to Haiti five years ago to work on his book State. The photographer doesn’t deny that Haiti is crippled by its unstable political situation and deep-rooted poverty, but, he says, that’s only one side of the story. “When you look at images from Haiti, you get this impression of a country that’s very far away from what it actually is,” he says. “For me, it was just a matter of looking around [to find other stories to tell.]” Woods only had to look around his hotel, where he stayed during his first month in Haiti, to find his story—one that centers on Haiti’s rich, upper-class population. “It was in December 2010, and we were getting close to the one-year anniversary of the earthquake, so a lot of journalists had come back to Haiti to do a story,” he says. “At that time, I was still living in a hotel in Port-au-Prince where a lot of media people gathered. What astonished me was that in this nice hotel, with working wifi and a swimming pool, you’d have all these photographers getting on motorbikes in the morning to go to Cité Soleil [one of the country’s poorest slums], take hundreds of images, and then come back to the hotel without ever looking at anything else.” time/3663893/haiti-photographers/
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 23:00:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015