Miami Herald photographer Patrick Farrell has won a Pulitzer for his news coverage of the storms that ravaged Haiti in August and September of last year. Farrell was in Cabaret , Haiti, near Port au Prince, when 12 children were pulled from the mud that had swept down onto Cabaret from the surrounding hills after Hurricane Ike.
Of particular interest to me was Farrell’s description of the great care which a father took in choosing a pretty dress for his daughter to be buried in. It reminded me of the photograph Klavs Christiansen image that I published in a previous blog, of a Haitian girl in a pretty dress, sitting in a chair, surrounded by mud, in Gonaives. Are Christiansen’s as powerful as the b/w frames that won the Pulitzer? Of course not, but they do reveal something of the paradox of Haiti, that even in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, beauty is something that has a meaning in the lives of the people. Only a broad and diverse vision can depict the spirit of Haiti; narrowing the focus by red-lining styles is counterproductive and will only result in one-dimensional redundancy.
Hopefully all of this attention to Haiti will reiterate concerns about the fragile state of the environment which was further degraded from its already compromised state by the storms that Farrell documented. Although less people were killed in Haiti than in New Orleans after Katrina (800, according to the government’s tally, ) the chances of catastrophic storms in the future are now almost inevitable, and my own fear is that tens of thousands of lives may be at risk to future storms, or to earthquake or landslides in the Port au Prince area, and more Pulitzer and World Press awards to given. I say this not to denigrate the awards, which are justified and well-earned, but to lament the plight of the Haitians who endure hardships beyond imagination yet seem happier than many Westerners.