Young Haitian Photographers Capture Haiti in a New Light | National Geographic

If Haiti doesn't want you here, she is living everything in her power to make you so miserable that you will run screaming for the next airplane out. But if she loves you, if she sees in you a kindred spirit, she rings your heart out every day and she has you coming back for more.

Well, in 2010, when the earthquake struck Haiti, an extraordinary number of journalists, many who had never been here before, came. It seems that most people come when there's a big event, a big crisis—TV reporters, photographers. It just became this sort of free-for-all for people looking for that picture. And so I think that's when things started to unravel a bit.

Haiti deserves to be in a good space, and it's just been really hard. I think we all were very strong and have hope for Haiti. There are hard times here, you know, but the media does it in a way that is really not what we want to show about ourselves. I don't think that we've done a very good job of representing Haiti as foreign press.

There's this great beauty that one wants to try to capture to sort of balance out the image that we also collectively create about Haiti as foreign journalists. And that's why I try to keep coming back, and I'm trying to photograph things that are different. And that's how actually Photo Combi, our organization, came to be born.

Combi is an action of many people to do something together for a common goal, and the common goal for Photo Combi is to show another side of Haiti by Haitians. So we're doing it together. We wanted to be able to put the power of Haiti's image back into the hands of Haitians.

We teach young people, and we go back, and we teach, and we reteach, and we reach there using cameras for the very first time. And they're taking the most extraordinary pictures. One of the important things we do is the students document their communities, but it's also the country.

The significance in having Haitians photograph Haiti is that I think we get to see who they really are. When young Haitians go into a community, into a market, especially the communities where they live, we see things about people that we would not see otherwise. They have that access, they have the trust of their community, and they just get pictures that other people just simply wouldn't get.

And they mean something by way of their photographs. We outsiders get to rethink Haiti; we get to rethink what it's about. For me, it's the beauty of Haiti, the soul of Haiti, and what happens in everyday life here and how beautiful it is, actually, you know? And I think it shows in the photos.

It's not a question of do we continue; it's just we continue. Mainly, we want to empower Haitians to show what is true about them and to create a new image of Haiti.