100Eyes Blog

(Originally published March 6, 2009)

The New York Times has revisited Gonaives, Haiti more than  six months after the wave of hurricanes that sent a sea of mud pouring down onto it, and much of the rest of Haiti.  Conditions seem to have improved slightly since August, when I travelled to that isolated city along barely  passable roads,  finding thousands of Haitians living on roof-tops and in abandonded schools, with sections of dirt streets impassable, trucks and cars digging trenches that became obstacles as much as allowing traffic to flow.

The Times report and the accompanying images by Lightstalker and UN prize winner Alice Smeets reveal just how little things have changed in Gonaives, but the problem in Haiti goes much further than the plight of one city, isolated in the north of Haiti, where mudslides like this have become almost a way of life.

The big picture is that the entire nation of Haiti is an environmental disaster waiting to happen; in which not only a thousands, but perhaps a hundred thousand die.

To set the backstory, Haiti’s environment has been compromised by centuries of unyielding poverty, forcing Haitians to life off the land, and exploiting the precious wood for cooking charcoal. Its most probable that Haiti was never blessed with the resources of its Dominican neighbors. Between Arbitonite, the lush rice yielding valley and Gonaives is a desert, complete with cactus trees. It rarely rains in Gonaives, which makes the hills above the city even more vulnerable to flooding when it does.

The Haitian mountains are slowly eroding, due both to the erosions of storms and the hand of man. Houses in Haiti are made of concrete and the stacks of slum houses in Port au Prince, built on mountainsides serviced by twisting roads, are the repository of what is carried from the mountains. There is no environmental policy in Haiti. Regulation does not exist, and the collapse of a concrete slab school in Port au Prince, and the death of dozens of children, brought that reality tragically home.

The question is not if, but when. It may be an earthquake, like the one that recently devastated Sichuan, or a Katrina-like hurricane, but overpopulated Haiti is in line with an environmental disaster of a inconceivable magnitude.

Exacerbating the danger is an transportation infrastructure that has grown worse since the Duvalier days, when at least Baby Doc, who enjoyed driving a sports car so much that he insisted on keeping the roads paved so he could speed down it. Whatever aid that might need to be administered here would have to be brought by air, and apart from the UN helicopters, and pilots operating out of the Dominican Republic, there are few resources available.

Although one would never guess it from the number of shiny relief agency SUVs motoring up and down the streets of Port au Prince, much of the country is left on its own, with many towns existing outside the meagre network of roads. Doctors from the Medicins sans Frontieres hired Dominican pilots to carry their doctors to areas of the country not accessible by road after the last series of storms.

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Although this time the Haitian rice crop wasn’t decimated as has been feared in August, there isn’t a lot of reason to be optimistic. Even with the exploitative possibilities of millions of hard working and educated Haitians laboring for pennies a day, there are only a few factories making goods for the the world’s consumer societies. Even the factory that made baseballs for the major leagues has been shuttered. Short of a miracle, it seems that Haiti, a country of marvelous artists and hard working people, will continue on its untenable path, until the next disaster comes. Limiting the threat to Gonaives is short-sighted. Certainly that city is in the cross-hairs, but in Haiti Mother Nature and her daughter Disease are threatening with a sniper’s rifle, but a loaded shotgun.

 

The photo below taken in Gonaives in September of 2008 links to a slideshow of my images:

 

This SlideShowPro photo gallery requires the Flash Player plugin and a web browser with JavaScript enabled.

 

And here is a link to the recent NY Times story and Alice Smeet’s slideshow:

Gonaïves Journal – Living in a Sea of Mud, and Drowning in Dread – NYTimes.com

Larry Clark is cool. His photography, like old pornography, has become vintage, and has little of the shock value that it had in the seventies and eighties, when his images of a gang rape in Bryant Park, and the junkies and adolescent sexuality of Tulsa brought us in contact with people on the edge of society. Now we are overwhelmed by images of sexuality and violence, and there is so much pornographic imagery available at a click, that the slightly guilty pleasure that one gets from voyeuristic imagery is gone. What had been forbidden is now innocent. The style of the outsiders and outcasts has become mainstream. Tattoos are everywhere, gutter punks are trendy-as is heroin. Nan Goldin and Philip-Lorca Dicorcia have followed in Clark’s tracks, and even now in Jessica Dimmock one sees hints of Clark. But it has become harder and harder to gain the intimacy that Clark had when photographing his childhood friends in Tulsa. Everyone is aware of the camera now, as well as the implications of being photographed. Clark has given up reportage in favor of more controlled situations, films in which the relationship between camera and subject are well-defined, and the consequences of being photographed contractual.

“When I was taking pictures in Oklahoma I didn’t know what I was doing
and the people didn’t know what I was doing. Now everybody is very aware of it.”

Le coin des suceuses: Cause We Like Drugs: Click her to Listen

GuardianUK internet columnist Roy Greenslade presents an analysis of an analysis of today’s closing of the Seattle Post Intelligencer written by Post Intelligencer columnist Bill Virgin.

Quoting Greenslade citing Virgin:

“He (Virgin, of course) begins by reminding readers that papers have been dying for decades and derides the claim that the internet is the main culprit.

 

“It obscures a long-standing truth about this business,” he writes, “American newspapers have been and continue to be, as a sector, the worst-run of any industry in this country.

 

“Though the net has been a contributory factor and the effects of recession cannot be ignored, he argues that “it was the industry itself that walked out onto a ledge of crumbling shale, and stood waiting for it to collapse.”

 

Here’s his take on the industry’s mistakes:

 

“Instead of using the internet as a complement to its print product, the industry went chasing after the web and offering its most valuable property – the news it so carefully and expensively gathered – for free, while chasing the chimera that online advertising would support the whole thing…

 

“In the process, what newspapers did was devalue their brands and the heritage and legacies built into them, their core products and the value proposition that brought them readers and advertisers in the first place.”

He argues that a newspaper provided “enough elements of interest to enough people (sports scores, local news, the crossword and Sudoku, the weather map and TV listings, letters to the editor, the comics, maybe even a business column or two)” to appeal to readers and, having aggregated enough of them, was then “attractive to advertisers seeking a mass audience.”

 

But papers began “lopping away content and features readers had come to expect. The rationale the industry used was that readers could and would get that information elsewhere, especially online, so why waste valuable print real estate on them?

 

“But the message readers got from the newspapers was they ought to go elsewhere for TV listings, stock quotes and the like. Surprisingly enough, readers took the advice and did.“

He (Greenslade) draws these conclusions:

Will it not be seen eventually as a reaction to a technological advance that was bound to lead to the death of newsprint?

Got that? And video killed the radio star.

I hope you enjoyed this analysis of the analysis of the analysis. Now back to Facebook hijack, where you can read the analysis of the analysis, and click through to the analysis itself:

here.

Or just keep it where it is and read about what Larry Towell is up to.

If you have been on Facebook (is there anyone who hasn’t) then you are a member of the social network community. Facebook has big plans for us, as has Google, who has been rolling out its own social and relational networking system– social network for a few years. What is driving these projects is our need to be in close contact with our expanding group of friends, once known simply as ‘networking’ a term defined, I believe, by 60′s activist Jerry Rubin in the 80′s. Just as we want to know about each other, the internet players want to know more about us, and their interest is probably as mercenary as it is friendly. They need to know more about us, and if having every search you ever made recorded for posterity is not enough, the companies that provide social networking software know who are friends are, who their friends are, and who the friends of our friends, friends are. And how do they know this? Of course we tell them, as well as what virtual gifts we like to send, which may in the future may not be so virtual. When Google was just a single entry form on a web page asking “What do you want to find,” no one had any idea what they were up to. I sense that this may be true with Facebook, and Google’s own Social Networking site that now include Friendster and Hi5. Caveat Emptor.

Google has developed special tools for creating ‘social networks,’ gifts and all and you can learn more about them here:
Social network – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lightstalkers is my favorite website. It has some 30,000 subscribers and the threads as informative just as they are often inflamatory. I am going to archive links to my favorite threads here, where I can carefully index and monitor them. This is the first:

Young wanting to start a career | Lightstalkers.

Tired of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own – NYTimes.com.

This maybe something photographers might want to think about: jellyfish tanks are an growth industry.