100Eyes Blog

Blogger Pete Brook of prison photography has taken on the task of interviewing photographers who documented the death of Fabienne Cherisma, a 12 year old Haitian girl who was shot in the head by police in the midst of the chaos the enveloped down town Port au Prince in the days immediately following the earthquake. Fabienne’s death was documented by more than ten photographers and images of her corpse appeared in papers all over the world, and Brook asks important questions about the murder of Fabienne, those who documented it, and what happened thereafter. The latest report culled from the search engine Google indicates that there has been nothing published about her death since January 25th. And as Brook points out in his conclusion, despite the apparent simplicity of identifying the police office who shot Fabienne at close range–there had been no effort to seek justice for Fabienne.

Among his insightful comments Brook questions why photographers, who were apparently grouped together around Fabienne’s fallen body, made a conscious effort to not show other each other in the frame. It was a spontaneous “spot news” event, unplanned, and including the other photographers in the frame would have only been a distraction. The idea is to make the audience feel that they are experiencing the events themselves, and I think the photographers did a brilliant job in a tragic and difficult situation. We are all angry at the death of Fabienne, but blaming the photographers, even if there were so many, is missing the point a bit.

Of course, if the end result is that the death is simply ignored, and the image is just one of a series of brutal depictions that are simply one version of what happened in Haiti, how can we not ask questions about the uses of photojournalism? Yet even then, photographers are really like ants on the back of the beast which is the media, whatever that means in the digital age. We can’t control the uses of our images, and we are often struggling just to survive ourselves.

For the most part the first two weeks of coverage from Haiti was drawn from a very limited area, and drawn from images taken by photographers, like myself, who were not Haitian. Although Haitian born Daniel Morel, was in Port au Prince when the quake struck, and documented the courageous Haitians who pulled each other from buildings, once the news photographers arrived, the press rarely ventured into the residential neighborhoods of Port au Prince, but instead reported from a small area of downtown that was close to the Plaza and Park Hotels where most where staying. This is coincidentally where almost all of the “looting” was taking place, and was also of the most heavily damaged areas of the city, certainly the most visual as far as showing the magnitude of the devastation. One of the difficulties in photography is that pictures are limited…..one image can’t convey the feeling one gets from seeing miles of devastation. The picture must be symbolic of a greater reality. Certainly the downtown area could be a symbol of Port au Prince as a whole in showing the effects of the earthquake, but it was not a residential area at the time, and the events there were certainly not representative of a greater reality, in which Haitians were heroic, did not loot, and in the first hours wandered about the city in search of their families and loved ones. Coincidentally, some of this reality was conveyed in Morel’s take from the first hours after the quake….

The result, and no fault of the photographers, was that the coverage was skewed, especially as the sensational looting scenes always play big in the newspapers. In fact there were many more people murdered by police after Katrina than in Haiti, but the proximity of the killings and the presence of so many photographers, gave a vastly different impression. In fact, although all of us who have spent time in Haiti know that the Haitians are for a most part peaceful people, we also know that argument can result in escalations to horrific and very public violence that included brutality unacceptable in most of the world– and that random violence of police against people have certainly marred the history of the country. But in this specfic case, the aftermath of the earthquake, the images of shot “looters” fueled a very negative perception of Haitians and in fact the police. The fact is that these were the exceptions rather than the rule, but they became the focal point of essays like the one produced by James Oatway for a South African paper, that although truthful does not really show the bigger story of what happened in Port au Prince after the earthquake, when most Haitians did not riot and many Haitians acted heroically. Unfortunately this perspective was often neglected in the press, who tends to stereotype Haitians as both violent and victims, of which the later may be slightly truer than the former, but neither of which really captures the Haitian personality in my opinion. I try to go out of my way to include in my edits some images that balance the violence with some humanity, and even beauty. Granted that this is easier because I do not work much in the food chain of the commercial press anymore, one that seems to take any event and simply use it up, and drop it, rather than deal with the longterm issues involved.

You can read all of the Pete Brook’s commentary and interviews with the photographers here.

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Haitian Photographer sued by Agence France Presse (AFP) for “antagonistic assertion of rights” Award winning Haitian born photojournalist, Daniel Morel, has filed an answer and counterclaim to the French international wire service Agence France Presse’s lawsuit filed on March 26, 2010 in Manhattan federal district court. The French international wire service which distributes to approximately 110 countries, which provides text, photographs, videos and graphics to customers on a worldwide basis, asserts that Mr. Morel “has made demands that amount to an antagonistic assertion of rights in his photographs of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010 at 4:54 p.m. taken in the hour immediately following the quake.

The Complaint asks the Court to declare AFP had the right to use Mr. Morel’s images without authorization or compensation and further claims damages for commercial disparagement based on Morel’s attorney Barbara Hoffman’s cease and desist letters to AFP subscribers customers, and clients, including Getty Images, Inc., the Boston Globe, the Denver Post, Time, Inc., Vanity Fair, USA Today, and the Age, Australia requesting that they cease and desist from the display on their websites, and online photo galleries, the images licensed from Agence France Presse or Getty and in the case of the Washington Post, correct the misattribution to a Lisandro Suero.

Mr. Morel’s answer and counterclaims admit that his lawyer sent such letters and further argues that AFP states no claim against him. Mr. Morel’s counterclaims assert that AFP willfully or in reckless disregard of his copyright and other intellectual property rights infringed thirteen (13) of the images of the earthquake in Haiti by distribution, license and sale of the photographs to its subscribers, clients and customers, with a credit to AFP and Getty Images and that these images were credited incorrectly to one Lisandro Suero, tweeting from the Dominican Republic at the time of the earthquake and with no prior history as a photographer.

Mr. Morel’s complaint also asserts claims against Getty Images, and CBS and ABC. Getty Images, an image distribution company is associated with AFP to distribute and license images in the United States. The latter two news companies, it is claimed, have independently infringed Mr. Morel’s copyright in seven (7) and nine (9) images respectively, in a variety of ways. When the earthquake struck, Daniel Morel was with an American journalist, Eric Parker in a school in Grand Rue, Port au Prince. Mr. Morel had been teaching the young students for the past three days on how to make their own Facebook pages and Mr. Morel was taking photographs to put on their Facebook pages, while his friend was buying art from the students. He states in his complaint that, “I was about ready to leave and the earth started shaking. I got out in the street, it looked like the street was hit by 500 cruise missiles at the same time. My journalist friend was buried. After we dug him out, we hit the street to obtain daylight shots. Everybody was panicked. Sobbing and dazed, people wandered around the street. It was rush hour. Lots of people were dead. Then I photographed until dark. I saw a lot of injured and dead—people crying for help. Buildings collapsed—the Cathedral of St. Trinity, the Cathedral, the Iron Market, the Presidential Palace, the Palace of Justice, my father’s bakery. The principal manifestations, institutions, and symbols of my Haitian childhood were destroyed in less than a minute. There were aftershocks every 15 to 20 minutes which lasted from three to five seconds.”

Few professional journalists and photographers were in Haiti at the time of the quake and even fewer had access to the internet. Mr. Morel’s Haiti earthquake photographs, including the thirteen, were among the first photographs by a professional photojournalist taken before sunset on January 12, 2010 to show the evolving tragedy tothe world. Mr. Morel’s complaint further describes the situation on the ground: “At sunset, it was dark, there was no electricity or communication—all phone networks were down. Mr. Morel, nevertheless from the still-standing landmark Oloffson Hotel, with the assistance of Isabel Morse, the daughter of his friend Richard A. Morse, manager of the hotel, was able to use a laptop to connect to the internet and have Ms. Morse open a Twitter account with the username “PhotoMorel” for him at 5:20 p.m.” Mr. Morel intended to retain copyright in and credit to his images, at the same time he informed the world of the disaster and advertised his images for license. Perhaps, it’s just the nature of an unfolding disaster that early pictures tend to be more sensational and less about telling a story. Daniel Morel was interested in licensing his images if the price, terms and conditions were right. He was not interested in selling or licensing cheap. It was enough that he and the world were witness to what had happened and what was happening. Later, he would tell the full and complete story of the Haiti Earthquake and the impact on the history of Haiti.

Apparently on or about 5:28 p.m., Lisandro Suero of the Dominican Republic, pirated Daniel Morel’s thirteen images and put them on his Twitter page. Daniel Morel’s claim then goes on to state that at approximately 9:45 p.m. EST, AFP uploads the earthquake images from Lisandro Suero’s account, without Mr. Morel’s knowledge, or permission. He alleges, on information and belief, that AFP conducted no investigation into the identity, profession, authorship or location of Lisandro Suero. The images were distributed to subscribers clients and customers worldwide. Mr. Morel alleges that at 2:06 a.m. on January 13, 2010, Ben Fathers (34Benjie) of AFP tweeted to Mr. Morel as follows: “Hi Daniel, great pictures from such a difficult environment. I work for AFP, please e-mail ben.fathers@afp.com.”One image seen below, appears on January 13, 2010 the front page of major newspapers worldwide, credited to “AFP/Getty Lisandro Suero.”

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Bangladeshi photographers have created a “human chain” to protest the police closing of an exhibit by acclaimed Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam depicting recreated crime scenes of assassinations by government “death squads” carrying out extra-judicial killings. The images, recently show on the New York Times Lens Blog, here, are interpretations of the sites of “cross-fire” killings, in which suspected criminals were killed under similar circumstances, during arrests conducted by the RAB, a extra-judicial force under the control of the Bangladeshi military. Crime is seen in Bangladesh as a major impediment to economic development of the nation.