Alice Smeets: Voodoo

I thought I'd continue my posts on photographic essays that deal with religious syncretism and feature the compelling work by Alice Smeets on Haitian voodoo.

Every year, thousands of Haitian pilgrims converge into the basin of Saut D'Eau's sacred waterfall to pray. They throw their clothes into the cascading waterfall where the faithful believe the Virgin Mary (known as Erzulie in Haitian Voodoo), appeared in the 1800s.

Haitian Voodoo was created by African slaves who merged their ancestral religious traditions with Roman Catholic practices, allowing them to continue observing their ancient beliefs under the scrutiny of the French colonialists. Today, many move freely between the two beliefs...the very essence of syncretism.

Alice Smeets is a photographer based in Belgium. She's interested in documenting social and cultural issues, with a special focus on Haiti and modern witchcraft.

Her clients include Geo, The New York Times, Sunday Times magazine, Le Monde, Internazionale, Days Japan, PBS, De Morgen, Glamour Magazine, ZDF. She has worked for charities like the Kindermissionswerk and UNICEF.

via Erica McDonald's DevelopTube

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Olivier Laban-Mattei: Award Winner Paris Match

Photo  Olivier Laban-Mattei- All Rights Reserved

 Olivier Laban-Mattei was awarded the 2010 Grand Prix Paris Match for his recent coverage of Haiti. This prize was created in 1980 and all French professional photographers can compete. Every two years, the prize is decided by an international jury, with the winner receiving 8,000 euros.The prize recognizes photojournalists who cover current events.

Olivier Laban-Mattei is a photojournalist who worked with AFP for 10 years, and left it a few months ago to start a career as an independent photographer. For the past decade, Olivier criss-crossed the world reporting on the Iraq war, the Haitian earthquake or the Gaza Strip humanitarian disaster.

Olivier's Haiti gallery contains a number of graphic photographs that relay the horror of Haiti's earthquake. I have naturally not seen all of the coverage of the Haiti earthquake, but this is one of the most hard-hitting of those I did see.

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Reuters Does Big: Full Focus

Photo  REUTERS/Carlos Barria -All Rights Reserved
Reuters has joined the other news media in featuring large photographs on a blog.

Full Focus, a large format showcase of Reuters award-winning photography, tells global stories. The agency seeks to use this imagery to foster a deeper understanding of current events and social issues, and Full Focus provides an opportunity for its readers/viewers to offer perspectives on the photographs and the topics they address.

The lovely photograph by Carlos Barria and is part of the Haiti Revisited photo essay, and is of expecting women waiting for tent distribution near the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince on February 19, 2010 during the aftermath of the earthquake.

I ought to add separate links (to the right of this page) for all the large-sized photo blogs of major news media...Boston Globe's The Big Picture, Sacbee's The Frame, WSJ Photo Journal, The LA Time's Framework, etc.

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Damon Winter: 2010 Visa d'Or News Award

Photo  Damon Winter/NYTimes -All Rights Reserved
Damon Winter won the Visa dOr News award in Perpignan for his work for The News York Times on Haiti and the earthquakes aftermath. The award is supported by Paris Match and was presented by the Visa Pour lImage director Jean-Franois Leroy.

Damon is a New York based photographer who specializes in documentary, editorial, and travel photography. He received a Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 2009 while with The New York Times.

Check his website on which his Haiti photographs appear...incredibly compelling and powerful.

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Beken: Haiti's Troubadour

Photo  Todd Heisler/The New York Times -All Rights Reserved
Here's a touching piece of multimedia that has Todd Heisler's fingerprints all over it. Heisler is the photographer of the "One in 8 Million" New York Times series that profiled 54 New Yorkers in weekly episodes from January 2009-January 2010.

Profiled in the same fashion is Beken, born Jean-Prosper Deauphin, who sings songs about despair and redemption that resonate deeply with Haitians, especially in its recent times of tragedy. Beken, who lost his right leg at a young age in a car accident, sings in Haitis troubadour tradition, and plays a guitar, connecting with his audience in songs of lament, humor and sometimes politics.

Singing The Suffering of Haiti is the title of the multimedia piece, and is narrated quite well by the author of the newspaper article, Simon Romero. Since I would have preferred a little less narration and more song, I would have used Beken's voice-over in Haitian, with the voice of a translator here and there. Notwithstanding, a well paced multimedia piece.

Haitian Singer and His Guitar Fight Urge to Weep is the article by Romero.

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Ron Haviv: Haiti

Let's move away from the insignificance of photojournalists conducting photo tours to Haiti (and wherever else there is human misery), and contemplate the work of Ron Haviv of VII Agency who, less than 24 hours after the earthquake hit the island on January 12, 2010, arrived in Haiti without fanfare to chronicle the ensuing devastation and human suffering.

Ron Haviv's photographs will be showing at an exhibition and fundraiser on March 4, 2010 at VII Photo Agency in Brooklyn, New York. VII is also releasing a book on the Haitian disaster. All the proceeds will go to Partners in Health.

This multimedia presentation was produced by telegraph21 and the VII Photo Agency.

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Ron Haviv: Haiti

Let's move away from the insignificance of photojournalists conducting photo tours to Haiti (and wherever else there is human misery), and contemplate the work of Ron Haviv of VII Agency who, less than 24 hours after the earthquake hit the island on January 12, 2010, arrived in Haiti without fanfare to chronicle the ensuing devastation and human suffering.

Ron Haviv's photographs will be showing at an exhibition and fundraiser on March 4, 2010 at VII Photo Agency in Brooklyn, New York. VII is also releasing a book on the Haitian disaster. All the proceeds will go to Partners in Health.

This multimedia presentation was produced by telegraph21 and the VII Photo Agency.

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Haiti's Tragedy: f/8 And Be There

Photo  Tequila Minsky /NYTimes-All Rights Reserved
The old adage (sometimes attributed to Arthur Fellig aka Weegee) of "f/8 and be there", meaning that being on the scene is more important than anything else, was borne out with the story in The New York Times that Tequila Minsky, a freelance New York City photographer, was in her hotel in Port-au-Prince when the horrific earthquake hit this capital city of Haiti.

Ms. Minsky transmitted some of the first photographs of the earthquake in Haiti, pictures that instantly conveyed the awful human toll.

The LENS blog of The New York Times bring us that story, along with its harrowing images, including Ms Minsy's own voice describing the scenes.

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Haiti

Ruxandra Guidi is a freelance radio and print news correspondent. During a five-week IRP Fellowship, Guidi traveled to Haiti to examine the effects of foreign aid on human rights, violence and povety. This Soundslides gallery, with photos by Roberto "Bear" Guerra and music by Luis Guerra, depicts the harsh living conditions in Haiti, a country gravitating from one humanitarian crisis to another.

The International Reporting Project (IRP) provides opportunities to U.S. journalists to go overseas to do international reporting on critical issues that are under covered in the U.S. news media.

(posted by TTP's robotic assistant)

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David Levene: Haiti's Saut D'Eau

Photograph © David Levene/The Guardian -All Rights Reserved
Every year, thousands of Haitian pilgrims converge into the basin of Saut D'Eau's sacred waterfall to pray. They throw their clothes into the cascading waterfall where the faithful believe the Virgin Mary (known as Erzulie in Haitian Voodoo), appeared in the 1800s.

Haitian Voodoo was created by African slaves merged their ancestral religious traditions with Roman Catholic practices, allowing them to continue observing their ancient beliefs under the scrutiny of the French colonialists. Today, many move freely between the two beliefs.

Being in London, I gleefully peruse all the British newspapers (which stand head and shoulders above ours in terms of candid and more substantial coverage...I know, I just can't help myself), and I was glad to have seen the Spiritual cleansing in Haiti feature, a SoundSlides with photographs by David Levene on The Guardian newspaper's website.

I'm surprised that it has no intro frames with titles and no credits, but the image sequencing and the accompanying ambient audio manage to pull it together. It certainly needs some "tarting up" as they say here, but otherwise it's an interesting feature.

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Anthony Karen: Voodoo

Photograph © Anthony Karen-All Rights Reserved
I came across Anthony Karen's work through NPR's website, on which he's described as having made a career out of breaking into secret circles from Voodoo rituals in Haiti to white-robed Ku Klux Klan initiations in the South of the US.

Indeed the work on his website centers around what he calls "intimate images of taboo people doing taboo things". His images are of swastika-clad families at the annual Nordic Fest gathering of white nationalists, Haitian Voodoo priests beheading goats and, even "Brother Number 3," a former official in the brutal Khmer Rouge regime hiding out in Cambodia before his 2007 arrest.

There are two links for Anthony Karen that are recommended: his website, and his interview with NPR which includes audio.

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Haiti: Bon Bagay (Cite Soleil)

Image Copyright © Marcello Casal Jr.-All Rights Reserved
Bon Bagay is one of the first expressions that foreigners arriving in Haiti understand...it means "nice people" in Creole. It has become the symbol of friendship between Haitians and foreigners.

This is a multimedia feature produced by RadioBras (Agencia Brasil), and there's a version in English. The photography is by Marcello Casal Jr., and is produced by Aloisio Milani.

A combination of still photography and video, it's about Cite Soleil...the slum where over 250,000 Haitians live in abject poverty. It includes interviews with residents of the slum.

Bon Bagay is perhaps predictable but it is still solid photojournalism.

Bon Bagay

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