If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now
Photographer: B. D. Colen
Exhibit Title: If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now
Location: Haiti
"If you lived here, you'd be home by now."
Those of us who live in the U.S. have probably all at some point seen that message on an apartment complex, a housing development, a luxury community. The message being, 'this is where you want to live.'
Well, try for a moment to imagine that you live in the market town of Lehoye, Haiti, on the Central Plateau. These images should give you a good sense of what your home would be like, and what life is like for those who live in this, one of the two poorest regions in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
"If you lived here, you'd be home by now."
Those of us who live in the U.S. have probably all at some point seen that message on an apartment complex, a housing development, a luxury community. The message being, 'this is where you want to live.'
Well, try for a moment to imagine that you live in the market town of Lehoye, Haiti, on the Central Plateau. These images should give you a good sense of what your home would be like, and what life is like for those who live in this, one of the two poorest regions in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Located at about 2,200 feet above sea level, less than 20 miles from the border with the Dominican Republic, Lehoye is reached over difficult, rutted dirt roads used my those on foot, horses, mules, and donkeys as much as by motor vehicals. It is a world of dust, mud, and human and animal waste, in which daily life is lived under conditions little different - but for the ubiquity of cells phones - than it has been lived in the 210 years since the former slaves of Frances richest colony established the Republic of Haiti.
Though Haiti is know to most casual observers as Caribbean island nation of brilliant colors and friendly, optimistic people who produce eclectic, original art works of all kinds - and it is that - the reality of Haiti is quite different. For what it is, friendliness and optimism aside, is a crushingly poor - 80 percent of the people live below the poverty line, more than half live in dire poverty, unemployment is shockingly high and the literacy rate is shockingly low - failed African state, dropped into the Caribbean Sea, kept afloat only by the efforts of NGO's to numerous to count.
And in Lahoye, that real Haiti is glaringly on display. So just imagine, for a minute, that the reality captured in these images is your reality.
Here are looks at my exhibits documenting four other aspects of life in modern Haiti:
A Death In Haiti - Staff in the emergency room of Hospital Bernard Mevs, in Port-au-Prince struggle to save a woman in her last half-hour of life;
These Could Be Your Children - Portraits of some of Haiti's 30,000 children living in orphanages, these in a well-run facility in Kenscoff, in the mountains outside Port-au-Prince;
Haiti and The Deception of Color - We always associate Haiti with brilliant colors and art, but this pairing of color and black and white versions of the same images asks whether, in fact, those brilliant colors simply serve to hide the crushing reality of life in Haiti;
L'Artibonite - Poverty in Paradise - A look at a supplementary feeding program in Haiti's rice growing region.
B. D. Colen
Email - bd@bdcolenphoto.com
Web - bdcolenphoto.com
Tumblr - bdcolen.tumblr.com
Twitter - @TheBDColen
Cell - 627-413-1224
About the Photographer
B. D. Colen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter, editor, and columnist who spent 26 years at The Washington Post and Newsday, covering medicine, health care, and health policy for 17 of those years. A photographer for more than 50 years, Colen began his professional photography career in 1963, covering the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for a weekly newspaper in Connecticut.
For the past 13 years Colen has taught documentary photography and journalism writing courses at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and has taught photography at the Maine Media Workshops and the Harvard University Extension School.
His work has appeared in publications from Newsday, to the New England Journal of Medicine, from the Boston Globe, to the Christian Science Monitor, and he has photographed for numerous corporate and institutional clients.
Colen has worked in Somalia, Liberia, and Haiti, and is available for international and national documentary work for NGOs, editorial clients, and private individuals.
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