Haïti, 2008
The work of the American photographer Jane Evelyn Atwood on Haiti is radically at odds with the imagery of violence and misery that current events regularly impose to evoke this Caribbean country. A break also in the writing of the artist who chooses color to translate her fascination for the Haitian people “incredibly alive and amazing”. Renowned for her long term black and white investigations into prostitution, prison, landmine and AIDS victims, Jane Evelyn Atwood approaches Haiti without prejudice, with a look that she wants to free of any prior influence. Modestly, she discovers people, she observes the daily life of individuals, the diversity of singular lives confronted with the savoir-vivre and the devoir-vivre that poverty and inequality require. She shows the unspoiled beauty of a people who do not abandon themselves to the black sun of fate and constantly reinvent a possible future. Atwood’s Haitian shots, especially his portraits, seem to draw chiaroscuro in broad daylight; the color here does not serve to accentuate a rich chromatic range already present in the viewfinder, but to emphasize contrasts, shadows or lights, which contribute to install a subtle form of intimacy with the universes photographed.
“Everything is there; everything that animates the contradictions of the Haitian way of life and the Haitian mal-vivre. Only nothing is given as typical or representative (…). We don’t photograph a country, but photos can be an opening on a country in the form of fragments. Just to show that there are only tiny fragments of the whole life to be seen. “
Lyonel Trouillot
—
Hôtel Paul Delaroche
58 rue Saint Lazare, 75009 Paris
+33 1 53 01 85 85
—
