Beyond the Headlines, Haiti — a project with a human face
This essay is an edited and shortened version of a talk I gave at the Africana Studies Department at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, on October 4th, 2021, at the launching event of a solo exhibit featuring photography from my free-lance project, Lives in (R)evolution. The photo exhibit was titled: Beyond the Headlines — Faces and Places, Haiti. The talk briefly describes my background, the goals of the Lives in (R)evolution project, the way it was born and the way it has so far been developing.
Lives in (R)evolution, Haiti
Good afternoon. It is an absolute pleasure to be here and present this project which I have been working on over the past three years in Haiti, with a Haitian journalist, Junior St Vil. This project has truly been, and still is, a labour of love and, unfortunately, it could not have become more timely and relevant, considering the recent news images reaching the US public following the earthquake of August 2021, or images over the past month from the Southern border.
In contrast to those images, my project has strived, from the outset, to be very different from a news report; it offers a perspective one would be hard pressed to find looking at the photos and videos of the press. It offers a peek into the lives of people who remain in Haiti.
I will talk for about fifteen minutes, giving a brief description about my background and about how this project came to be. I will talk about the individual images that I chose to be part of the exhibit, to give them some context and to explain why I thought they would be a good match for this particular selection. Then I want to open the floor up to questions and a conversation, which I am very much looking forward to having.
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I was born and raised in late-soviet Hungary. I lived in Israel for a year in the mid1990s and I moved to the United States in the year 2000. At the time, I was neither a writer, nor a photographer. I had a Law Degree alongside the realization that working as a lawyer was not for me, that I wanted to choose a different path in life. I started walking that different path, and after several bifurcations and challenges I went to pursue graduate studies at the Africana Studies Department at SUNY, Stony Brook. I graduated in 2018.
During my studies I came to be interested in the way that narrative paradigms and belief systems influenced perceptions of reality — or, to put it more simply, how everything that surrounds us, what we read, learn, being taught and are allowed to see not only shape our view of life but also influences our lived experiences. Along the latter part of my graduate years I also came to be interested in the historical merger and longstanding diversity which is reflected in the overall culture of the Caribbean. These two interests met in my thesis research which examined the connection between political discourse/political messaging and religious beliefs in Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship and the resistance movement led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide (mid-late 20th century).
I first went to Haiti in late 2017, right before finishing my graduate research. As a duly trained academic, I arrived in the country with the goal of collecting material for my research, which happened to regard the recent past, and ten days later I left with the firm knowledge that I needed to return and collect stories about the present. Stories that will allow my readers (or viewers, in the case of images) to see more than what meets their eyes when they look at news reports or nonprofit fundraisers, or even academic research about Haiti — mainstream areas of knowledge production about the country which allow certain aspects of life to be seen, while hiding others.
Thus, one of the main goals of the Lives in (R)evolution project is to dispel the shadow cast by newsroom decisions and commercial considerations; to look behind the sensational or the pity-inducing, and to invite the daily and the subtle to become visible. When collecting the stories and taking the photographs I looked at the same reality as other professionals do, but I sensed that a different, less prescriptive frame around the details of life in Haiti should be drawn — a frame which hopefully not only ‘talks’ or ‘raises awareness’ about the humanity of the protagonists, but encourages the readers and viewers to live that humanity through connecting it to their own experiences, as much as possible despite the distance, be it mental or physical.
Having joined forces with Junior St Vil, the journalist I mentioned earlier, I returned to Haiti after my initial visit 5 times over the past three years. I travelled the country with Junior; I met with, and talked to people and then started writing about what they told me and what it was that I saw, and sometimes also about how all that I saw related to my own life and my own past.
I learned to take pictures. This was important not only because the photography complemented the written stories, but because the images themselves stood as an effective challenge to the endless array of journalistically or commercially motivated visuals that people in the United States are presented with, not only about Haiti, but about most places in the world, a fact that I, as someone who comes from Eastern Europe, have seen through personal experience all too often.
(Description of individual photographs is not included in this version of the text).
I want emphasize that while the goal of my photography is to establish a different narrative frame, or perhaps a different frame of reference for viewing, my work, in general, has not been created with the intention to dismantle, to expose, to call out or to negate— it has been created with the intention to complement and to add, to encourage viewers that while not forgetting the culture they come from they take a look beyond its horizons and start thinking across cultural, racial, religious and ethnic lines — to lessen the limitations those lines tend to place on all of us. This work has been guided by a belief in the value of subtlety and complexity, as opposed to categorization, external judgement and moral or intellectual certainty. It has been guided by an awareness of our inner contradictions as human beings, and by a belief in our shared human essence and shifting fate.
Lives in (R)evolution has been a labour of love. As I am neither a faculty member at a university nor a staff writer at a newspaper, positions that would grant me the ethos, status and perks (and here I mostly mean a chance to receive funding and effective support) that come with such positions, Junior and I had to work on a self-financed basis, with a very low budget. But we loved what we were doing and we felt that offering a different perspective was important. On the plus side, we had the freedom to do and to say what we thought was meaningful and informative, not what funding agencies thought they wanted to take on. So, like any situation in life, this reality had its advantages and disadvantages.
Our project is not simply about Haiti. Through the differences and the commonalities of the contributors, a woman of half-Jewish descent from Eastern Europe and a dark-skinned Haitian man — and here I am avoiding the term ‘identities’ on purpose, because neither of us feel that our respective background or cultural context would uniquely define who we are in life and what it is that we are able to understand — this project symbolizes the possibilities of looking beyond ethnicities, class or racial differences, beyond cultural dictates, and see each other as equal partners. To see both the beauty and the challenges of black lives, and of human lives in general, within a global context.
To learn more about my work, please visit my website:
