Scenes from a
tarnished pearl

>> Agence Stock Photo’s Jean-François Leblanc
and Caroline Hayeur present stunning
images of Haiti in a new exhibit

COUNTRYSIDE IN DECLINE:
Between the Gonaives and Cap Haïtian mountains, 1994

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

It isn’t often someone hears voodoo described as a cliché. But Montreal photographer Jean-François Leblanc was looking for something else when he travelled to Haiti, some untold story other than that of the strange, often misunderstood religion that defines—fairly or unfairly—the cultural face of a country once known to the world as the Pearl of the Antilles.

Leblanc, a founder of Montreal’s Agence Stock Photo agency, likes to focus on what’s called the human condition—the daily lives of ordinary Haitians, their homes, their (often brutal) working conditions, their clothes and cities and food. In a new exhibit called Comment ça va?, underway at the TOHU complex, he and fellow Agence Stock Photo photographer Caroline Hayeur will be showing the fruits of two decades’ worth of images shot in the country, in all its extremes and contradictions (another cliché, but one Leblanc admits is apt).

So, while he decided not to focus on voodoo rituals and ceremonies, he does say Haitian spirituality is inescapable—as if it’s in the very air.

SIESTA SISTER: A woman naps ahead of a meeting of the
Femmes Paysannes de Petites-Rivière-de-Nippes, 2003

“I’m not a religious person, or someone who believes in mysticism,” he says. “But I could become one if I stayed there. Haiti is a magical country, and the people there believe so strongly, it’s like they give off some sort of… cerebral energy.”

It’s clear Leblanc is struggling to find the right words. “I’ve never felt anything like it. It’s the most mystical country I’ve ever been in.”

Magic in the air

Mystical, but poor and desperately troubled. Leblanc first visited the country in 1987 to shoot the country’s first post-Duvalier elections. The political climate, he says, was palpably tense, but by the time he returned in 1991, “things had cooled down. There was a very positive atmosphere, it was much less risky to walk down a street with a camera in your hand… but now it’s much more dangerous.” He made more than a half-dozen other trips, altering his reportage thematically every time. His visits have taken him from Haiti’s countryside to the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic—where he shot the working conditions of the Haitian cane-cutting braceros—to the inside of Haiti’s nightmarish prisons.

The country, he says, has changed over the past 20 years, “unfortunately, for the worse.” Slums have sprawled, deforestation is rampant, hygiene has worsened, security has collapsed and wealth distribution is more polarized than ever. “It’s remarkable how Port-au-Prince has deteriorated,” he says.

But the vivid, splashing, vital colours that dominate the country’s aesthetic remain as bright today as they did in the late ’80s.

“The colours are imposing,” says Leblanc. “The clothes, the homes—everything has bright colours. And with the light from the sun, the photos become saturated. It can be a problem—I used to work with slides, which have very high-contrast film, but there was so much contrast you couldn’t see the shadows.” Going digital solved that problem, as well as the trouble of transferring colour images into black and white.

SPIRITUALITY AND SQUALOR:
Marché de la Croix des Bossales, Port-au-Prince, 2000

Colour explosion

Hayeur, for her part, describes Haiti’s visuals as “vibrant,” “wonderful” and “extraordinary.” “It was my first experience with colours like that,” she says. Unlike Leblanc, she travelled to Haiti first in 2000, and returned in 2002, for the AfricAmericA Biennale, a showcase of contemporary Caribbean art, where she met local journalists and artists who showed her parts of Haiti that are otherwise unwise for foreigners to visit.

“We travelled in totally different contexts,” she says of the difference between her and Leblanc. While his photographs concentrated on social and political issues, she turned her lens mostly on ceremonies, spirituality and folk dances. She’d explored the same theme in other countries, including her hometown of Montreal, and chronicled the local rave scene of the mid-to-late ’90s in her first book, Festive Ritual.

“I was travelling with a small camera, so I looked almost like a tourist,” she says of her time in Haiti. “I had more freedom to move around, because I didn’t look like I was a journalist judging them.” Her portraits of people standing in front of the burned-out husks of their former homes brought the reality of life in Haiti home for her, though, and the grimmer parts of daily life in Haiti did not escape her.

Hayeur says she’s never uncomfortable around large numbers of armed men (although she did shoot the violent Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2000, where she was hit by a policeman’s rubber bullet), and she found the experience eye-opening.

“In China, you can wander around a market at 3 a.m. by yourself without any sense of insecurity,” she says. “In Haiti, you can’t go anywhere, you always have to be with someone.”

It’s something Leblanc, who on his later trips had to travel with armed bodyguards in an armoured vehicle provided by the UN Stabilization Mission forces, echoes. “There was never any question that they’d leave me alone,” he says.

Visual stimulants

“It’s not a country that is easy to shoot,” he says. “There is a lot of wariness and aggression there. You can often get yelled at, even assaulted. There are mentally ill people walking the streets who can come up and attack you with a machete, and just because you’re a white person and have a camera doesn’t mean you’re immune from that.”

(Grim as that image is, Hayeur tells an amusing anecdote about walking through a slum in the capital and being the first white person some of the children had ever seen. “They jumped with fright, and then, when they got over their shock, held out their hands, thinking I was rich, saying, ‘Blanche, blanche, blanche!’ So I had to say back to them, ‘Artiste blanche, pas d’argent!’”)

Despite the physical danger, Leblanc knew that he couldn’t shoot the country properly from a distance. All his photos are of people, from the braceros to prisoners. And while the threat of violence is inescapable, he found a warmth, humour and a certain fatalism permeating the national character.

“Haitians just seem to accept things, as if it’s what God wants,” he says. “I was photographing inside a prison, where conditions were terrible, and the prisoners were smiling, accepting their fate, and it was almost as if they were happier inside the prison than outside.”

But despite the difficulties, contradictions and squalor, both photographers plan on returning to Haiti at some point, if only because of the wealth of subject matter to shoot.

“Haiti is still an interesting place for foreign media,” he says. “And it’s very photogenic. If you’re there for two weeks and can’t take any good pictures, then you have to be a pretty bad photographer.”

WARMTH, HUMOUR AND A CERTAIN FATALISM:
Port-au-Prince Market, 2002

Comment ça va? is on display at the TOHU
(2345 Jarry E.) until March 9. The official opening
is tomorrow, Friday, Jan. 18, with Leblanc and Hayeur
present at 6 p.m. For more info see www.tohu.ca.