A New Photography Show in Fort Lauderdale Takes a Deeper Look at Haiti

By George Fishman, Miami Herald
June 12, 2015

Everyone has seen the graphically tragic news photos of Haiti: horrific devastation from hurricanes and earthquakes; hunger and homelessness; ferocious political upheavals. For many outsiders, that’s what Haiti is — one disaster after another. With perhaps an “exotic” vodou ritual thrown in.

This tunnel vision excludes elements that Haiti’s own people — and a relative handful of outsiders — have come to know. And one that the organizers of the upcoming exhibition at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale plan to share.

From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography redresses that woefully inadequate picture, not by substituting a glamorized image but through a deep historically rooted comparison of how insiders and visitors represent the country and its people through photography.

Haiti’s photo documentation has been a longtime passion of Edouard Duval-Carrié, who guest-curated this exhibition, assisted by acclaimed photographer Maggie Steber, a former Miami Herald director of photography. Duval-Carrié is a highly recognized artist with extensive curatorial experience, especially with Caribbean-based exhibitions. His research has led him to several important — but little-exposed — collections of photography both within and outside Haiti. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale director Bonnie Clearwater’s parallel interest converged with Duval-Carrié’s while she was curating an exhibition of Bruce Weber’s photography at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami (MOCA) several years ago.