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I was a portraitist. I had met my new girlfriend Kirsten in the aforementioned club only three weeks prior to my flight to the Caribbean island. Oddly enough, we had both thought about Haiti, and we were aware of Maya Deren and Voodoo, the paintings, the street scene, and the intense poverty. We went fearlessly and jumped at the chance to go. Jacmel, the wonderfully idyllic coastal town that had prospered during the colonial turn of the century due to it’s rich coffee plantations, had a charm unlike any other I had ever seen. The French colonial mansions were stunning. The people so warm and engaging. They wanted to bring you in. But my French was not so good. My Creole non-existent. The indigenous folk music rang out at night and the festive environment was a first for this New Yorker. I was initiated into the magic that was to be Haiti. You have to remember, this was the era of Baby Doc Duvalier and the poor were many. He controlled the repressive Ton-Ton Macoute, the “Revolutionary Guard” of Haiti. The first independent republic in the Caribbean, Haiti nonetheless remained in a time warp, a living anachronomism, like in the time of the early 1800’s. Throw in very little investment and deforestation, and you have a very poor place.

I had brought my Balcar studio strobe light with me along with my Rollei 2 ¼ camera, my Pan-X film, but, not being an electrician and even then knowing about voltage, the unit blew up ~ it was a 110v light/power source. (The current there was 220v).

So I used a little hand flash I brought, thank God, and grabbed the bedspread from the Hotel Jacmelienne to use as a makeshift backdrop, and I sought a boutique off the Iron Market to set up the portraits. “Deux Gourdes por foto?” I would ask. I wound up “casting” right off the main market. And for the equivalent of 40 cents, I had 200+ people willing to sit for a portrait and a Polaroid.

So I used a little hand flash I brought, thank God, and grabbed the bedspread from the Hotel Jacmelienne to use as a makeshift backdrop, and I sought a boutique off the Iron Market to set up the portraits. “Deux Gourdes por foto?” I would ask. I wound up “casting” right off the main market. And for the equivalent of 40 cents, I had 200+ people willing to sit for a portrait and a Polaroid. It all worked out, in the intense heat of the day and the intense heat of that flow. I got the mix, even with the little light source which taught me so much about minimalism.

And at night, the place felt like magic, too. If you ever doubted Voodoo’s existence, Jacmel was not the place to disbelieve.

In any case, I’ve always loved these portraits. They look spontaneous. Like they were shot in a cave. The hand flash was perfect. And the Polaroids were a great touch in the sense that giving them to the subjects was a wonderful gift for having sat for me.
I could only hope that the black and white film looked as good as the sample Polaroids had looked. And it really was the start of a certain fascination documenting the “unseen” peoples of the world. Other people could handle the celebrities. I’ll take the common man pushing the wheelbarrow.

I used to say to myself that I would begin an art career in order to photograph everyone in the world. I got off to a pretty good jump, but after some time I realized it was going to take alot more time than I had anticipated. But Haiti was a good start.

–William Coupon

Photo Booth Self-Portrait/William Coupon

William Coupon (b. 3 December 1952) is an American photographer, born in New York City, known principally for his formal painterly backdrop portraits of tribal people, politicians and celebrities. William Coupon was born in New York City, but moved to Washington, D.C. and later to San Francisco. He attended Syracuse University and ultimately moved to New York City to begin his photographic career. He began in 1979 to photograph backdrop portraits of New York’s youth culture, to document its “New Wave/Punk” scene at the then popular Mudd Club in lower Manhattan. Commercial work soon followed for a variety of international magazines, record companies and advertising agencies. He continued to photograph portraits, often of various sub-cultures and indigenous peoples in the 80’s and early 90’s including Haitians, Florida State Penitentiary Inmates, Australian Aboriginals, Drag Queens, Alaskan Eskimos, Scandinavian Laplanders, Turkish Kurds, Israeli Druzim, The Traditional Dutch, Moroccan Berbers, New Guinea Tribesmen, Brazilian Caraja, Malaysian Penan, Native Americans, and the Mexican Lacandon, Huichol, Mennonite and Tarahumara. These were titled his “Social Studies” series. He was invited to photograph the world’s tribal leaders during Earth Summit in May of l992, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His most current work embraces the digital medium, in places like Cuba, Venezuela and in his native America, which is more candid, but still formalistic in approach. The portrait style is up-close and painterly, with very warm earth tones against a mottled canvas. The style is usually medium-shot and classically lit using medium format cameras, referencing the Dutch painting masters such as Rembrandt and Holbein. The portraits have a quality about them that is less about fashion than about personality and as groups there is attempt to show their disparity as well what is relatable amongst the earth’s faces in a manner that is real, non-compromising, or over-glamorized. They were often accompanied by environmental images, which have a noticeably journalistic feel. Other work includes a series of champion boxers, a nude series, a collected doll portrait series, and a still life project of found objects. Some of his most notable images are of the Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton which were “Person of the Year” covers for Time Magazine, Yasser Arafat, George Harrison, Mick Jagger, and Miles Davis.

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