If I say the word “Haiti”, what comes to your mind? If the mainstream media is an indicator of what messages are trafficked and made available for mass consumption, then “Haiti” is conceived in terms of its fractious bloody politics, extreme poverty, Save the Children campaigns, and the culture of voodoo of the popular imagination. Through the process of admixture, a general characterization assumes tangible form, constructed from individual components of truth (politics has been repressive for Haitians, voodoo is a thriving spiritual culture) that ultimately yields a distortion. For the negativity that inherently contextualizes this characterization fosters the impression of helplessness and hopelessness in the mass imagination, of a situation requiring endless charity and pity as opposed to providing the assistance for self-empowerment. That’s the way things are, that’s how it will be, one shrugs, thus consigning a people many will never know and a place many will never see to an interminable status of entrapment which translates into a relegation to a status of inferiority and irredeemability.

If this sounds familiar (and it should) such an attitude mimics the rationale of Western colonialism, replicates the view derived from the philosophy of history (Herder and Hegel, in particular) that judged various non-Western societies as if the evolution of global cultures occurred according to a master plan, whereby the light of health and superiority bestowed itself upon one group of peoples. Although we have made critical strides in rectifying those philosophical and political errors, in many ways we still exchange the message that certain peoples—in our case, the people of Haiti—are somehow “lost”, that what we do see of them is so foreign to our sensibilities and understanding that we can’t see a connection between us and them. Even though differences exist amongst peoples—after all, they constitute the great diversity of our world—what we focus on and how we frame our images of the Other will decide the “reality” we accept and on whose basis we act.

“Life in Fondwa: Daily Struggle, Eternal Hope” enters visual discourse not to the exclusion of politics or the urban Haitian experience but as complementation to the aforementioned. Indeed one might view “Life in Fondwa” as a cultural political endeavor: the specific purpose of Rebecca Sherman’s visit to Haiti was to document this rural Haitian community’s daily life during its current period of grass-roots community organization and environmental sustainable development revitalization; as these 7000 residents, guided by the optimism that joint activism often produces, struggle with the economic, environmental, political and social ills that have long destabilized Haitian society and prevented the country from enjoying its rightful share of prosperity and well-being.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Eighty percent of the population lives in extreme poverty, illiteracy is rampant, infant mortality is high, and fifty-one years is the average life expectancy. In cruel, ironic contrast, the historical existence of Haiti is directly attributable to the succesful slave revolts of the 1790s and early 1800s—the world’s first and only such rebellion, now known as the Haitian Revolution—yet the successful creation of a black independent nation-state in the midst of white European colonial powers would fall victim to the economic and political machinations of those colonial powers and to internal factional politics. Maybe the irony of Haiti’s founding became suppressed and lost along the way, the dramatic importance of what that original emancipation really meant for its people then and could mean for their descendents today having been nearly obliterated by two hundred plus years of the brutal politics of self-interest. That is, until now…

In 2004, the Peasants Association of Fondwa founded the University of Fondwa. This is Haiti’s first and currently only rural university, modeled on the Cuban “university in the mountains”, and training the region’s peasant students in agronomy, agriculture, and veterinary medicine—namely, in areas vital to rural Haitian life and infrastructure. From UNIF’s mission statement: “We hope to train and create professionals capable of achieving agricultural development which is compatible to mountainous ecosystems, including the rational use of renewable natural resources, as well as technological, human, and financial resources.” The APF itself is the realization of an awareness of the necessity for solidarity—one of UNIF’s core principles—in the face of large-scale problems affecting not just one individual’s ability to drink clean water or harvest healthy crops but affecting the community as a whole, and ultimately the nation itself.

Founded in 1988, the APF sought to examine “their situation of social exclusion” that had been produced through the absence of “all social infrastructure…no potable water, no decent primary school, no passable road, no health center, no technical experts for the peasants to learn from, no electricity, no means of communication, no financial institutions or sources of micro credit. Young people left the area to live elsewhere, because they saw no future in Fondwa.” Imagine the magnitude of this national situation once it is realized that Fondwa’s pre-1988 state reflected the same among countless other rural communities. Over the course of sixteen years, the APF (and now UNIF) has developed a complex ethic of egalitarian social justice democracy allied with responsible entrepreneurship and eco-care, including the understanding of science and technology’s benefits for progress, and situated within a civic-minded framework that both respects rural peasant culture and identity while positively integrating it within the larger national Haitian culture and identity. UNIF “will be a bridge and a permanent center for all the agents in the rural communities of Haiti who are involved in sustainable development projects.”

The contemporary aesthetic basis of Sherman’s “Life in Fondwa” originates in observable transformations in the rationale of documentary photography: i.e., the movement away from a 20th Century-style social realism that purported to achieve objectivity in such a way that the photographer’s own subjective relationship to the content would somehow be excluded from the process of visual reportage. (Walker Evans and his 8 x 10 large format camera which artifically created the appearance of objective dispassion comes to mind.) A significant trend in today’s documentary photography, of which Sherman’s work is a part, has been moving towards a photographic style of realism that is more self-conscious of its influence on how its subject matter is approached and how it will be constituted and transmitted after that definitive click.

While this reorientation in documentary realism’s rationale still seeks to empower usually marginalized persons or situations, like the style out of which it has emerged, its explicit intention is to restore the positive and dignified aspects of life and experience that the former realism often elided through its alliance with radical leftist politics—a politics, however well-intentioned at the time, that cast its subject matter as victims of oppression, injustice, and the hostile forces of fate. To be sure, this form of “raising consciousness” was a necessary step in confronting the more affluent classes of what they were choosing to ignore, but this kind of photography has also served especially well as a means for mass media’s “process of contextualization”—i.e., how the spin is applied to realist imagery—in which fetishizing tragedy becomes preferable to visually negotiating the complex reality where the beautiful and the ugly intermingle and to promoting self-empowerment that draws its strength precisely from that intermingled relationship.

For Sherman, this realist rationale translates first into a self-conscious disposition of the outsider always concerned with her ability to properly understand a moment, a scene, and to effectively translate that moment into an honest depiction that captures the very genuine beauty of a child’s smile (even in poverty children smile, laugh, and play) or the proud self-presentation of a woman standing barefoot on an ashen-colored dirt floor in a ramshackle domicile—this woman may suffer and endure dire hardship, but it is also immediately apparent that she possesses a certain dignity and intrinsic happiness. Of course, Sherman does not ignore the more negative aspects of the lives of Fondwa’s residents, like the young girl who must walk for miles for clean water and drinks a significant portion of it on her return home; or the little girl dressed in a Western-style plaid suit who stares into the camera and at the photographer in a poignant moment that very well could serve for a Save the Children poster. Sherman does not ignore Fondwa’s landscape of environmental hardship—notice the widespread absence of forest for a moutainous region in a tropical climate, the result of excessive deforestation—or the emaciated conditions of a horse who looks too worn out to do anything more than breathe. Yet is Sherman’s message ultimately one of despair? Does her reportage reproduce what is prevalent in the mass media? I would argue no, and I would argue that even these pictures are part of the overall rationale of using this new documentary realism to engage the relationship of the negative and the positive while adapting that engagement to the mission of undermining entrenched negative perceptions so that the complex humanity emerges into its rightful place of equality and can thereby exercise its own claim to truth.