Maggie Steber
July 17, 2001Guy--Here are some thoughts about photographing in Haiti. You are welcome to share this. I think one of the best commentaries I ever read--and one I agree with--is the poem by Felix Morisseau-Leroy "Touris pa pran p̣tre m" about the tourist with a camera. It comments exceptionally well from a Haitian point of view. But here's what I have to say:
When one is in Haiti, one walks in a dream. Time is telescoped and one jumps erratically from one scenario to another without any links to join them and no interpreter to explain them. Sometimes the dream is one of excruciating beauty and sometimes it is terrifying.
Haiti is like an ache in the bones, bittersweet and seductive, addictive. People go there and either hate it, being repelled by the immense poverty and daily violence of living, or they fall in love with it. I've always thought it was Haiti that did the choosing. Whomever it wanted on its shores was welcome. If it didn't like you or need you, it did everything in its power to repel you, to send you flying. But if it saw in you a kindred spirit, capable of empathy and dramatic hyperbole, it allowed you to remain. It captured your heart, breaking it daily with its melange of beauty and suffering, and its narcotic of political dueling and the spirit world's mysterious magic.
One must be very careful not to romanticize Haiti, neither its poverty nor the exotic lust and violent adventure early writers described in travel books from the 20s and 30s. It is a real place with real people, the majority of whose lives are engaged in a daily struggle of survival to eat, to work, to live. Haiti is the daughter of Africa and France. It grew up in isolation because it was too strong, too independent, too strange. This land and people have been so violated by so many who had a hand in its formation. Its lands are haunted, drenched in the blood of great heroes and small children. It is as though the fates pointed one day to Haiti and declared, "There shall we put the portal between Heaven and Hell!" Everything fits neatly into that concept of extremes.
Two things are certain. The first is that Haiti is a place filled with lessons. It chooses you because there is something you need to learn. It is a living parable, a Shakespearean epic in which you are supposed to participate. And the experience changes your life forever.
The second thing is that whatever you think you know about Haiti amounts to nothing. Actually, anyone who is not Haitian can never really know Haiti, or completely understand it. Non-Haitians like me stand with our noses pressed up against the glass window, able to look inside but unable to enter, no matter how much we fool ourselves to the contrary. No matter how great our desire. At best we can offer ourselves up as a conduit which gives voice to a people whose cries compose a song of survival.
And when it comes to using Haitians by way of photographing them, here's how I address that issue. I have to do this or else I am no better than the worst exploiter. When I realized that I would continue to work in Haiti, I made a pledge that 50% of all monies I made with my Haitian photography would return to Haiti. Not to charities. Directly to people. And if I couldn't find the people I had photographed to give the money to, I put children through school with it and helped a woman with five children build a house. I helped send a young woman political activist to law school. And when I took pictures, I gave people money even though my colleagues would chastise me if they knew because then Haitians wouldn't allow them to take pictures unless they paid. And many times, I used the money for people I never photographed, like a legless beggar for whom I bought a used wheelchair or a man for whom I bought a car to use as a taxi to feed his family. I am not wealthy at all. And it's very expensive to work in Haiti, especially when a photographer does so without financial compensation from magazines who are only interested in it when it's exploding. But Haiti wrings everything out of you including your money. And money is nothing in comparison to what you realize from it. It can be very one-sided. So it's important to keep the balance there.
And if people don't want to be photographed, I don't take their photo. It is important to note, however, that often, very often, Haitians have asked me to take their picture. They wanted to be photographed and if I could, I would take a copy of the photograph back to them. On several occasions, I took hundreds of Polaroid photos of Aristide's street orphan boys who, in their delight, fought over them and shredded them to pieces at a $1 per sheet of film. And I took color prints back to the small village of Duverger where I spent a week and took formal portraits of every single person in the area. When I returned with the prints, people were so delighted they killed a pig in celebration, a precious pig. I have buried people's mothers and paid for the doctor and medicines for their children. I have paid rent on houses and carried big suitcases of clothes and shoes into the countryside and stopped along the road where a farmer was planting and invited him and his family and anyone else I could find to come to the car and take what they needed. Are these things acts of charity? No. They are payback. They are payback for allowing me to see the beautiful young girl in a tattered blue lace dress dancing in the dirt of Rabato. They are payback for letting me help deliver the baby of a woman in the dirty doctorless Gonaives hospital. They are payback for watching as the mysteres danced around the heads of hounsis at ceremonies.
Haiti, almost more than my mother, gave life to me. I can never repay the Haitian people. But I will try to as long as I breathe. I normally don't share all this information with people for fear of making myself sound righteous and self-important. But I do believe that we all have to stand for something. One last thing: sometimes when photographers point their cameras, it is to capture the courage and spirit of a people. While that doesn't help fill the stomachs of starving people, the most important thing that photography does is to document history. And photographs are evidence that someone lived....and died....and the photographs are an attempt, in some few cases, of ensuring that a life meant something.
None of the above excuses exploitation. That will go on long after we are gone. What I would like to do is to be collaborative with the Haitian people in telling their story. They wear me out because it needs so much telling. If no one ever took the picture, who would know of the violence sent against them, of the injustice, of the hunger and poverty, of the beauty and the courage and the indominatable spirit of these children of history? People would only have words to read. Word, too, can be exploitive.
Read what Seabrook wrote. And just as there are bad things written and good things written, there are good photographs that go beyond showing a person who is poor and show us besides someone who is rich in courage. A bad photograph can show someone who looks miserable in their suffering and is not taken in any way that draws us into that person's whole experience. I cannot make excuses for photographers and what they do. I can only say that sometimes there are some who try to do something that is good.
Well, it's a very complicated and uneasy issue. Share any or none of this with anyone you wish. And thanks for the opportunity to write.
Respect,
Maggie