❤ Love For Haitian Food - Episode 6 - How to Cook Sos Pwa Nwa

Sos Pwa (Bean Sauce)

Ingredients 

  • 2 cups dried red beans, rinsed 
  • 3 scallions 
  • 1 tbsp parsley 
  • 2 shallots 
  • 2 quarts water 
  • 2 chopped cloves of garlic
  • 4 cubes of chicken bouillon 
  • Salt, black and hot pepper to taste 

Directions

Combine scallions, parsley, shallots, and hot peppers to form a paste.

Heat oil over medium heat and add seasoning paste, beans, and scallions. Add water, parsley, and bring to boil.  Cover and simmer for 2 hours, or until beans are tender.  Blend beans and juice in an electric blender or force through a strainer.  Return sauce to low heat and season to taste. 

Missions in Haiti

Short promo created for the Arkansas Baptist State Convention.

WINNER - "Best Promotional Film" // 2014 Christian Worldview Film Festival
RUNNER-UP - "Best Missions Awareness" // 2014 Christian Worldview Film Festival

Filmed with the Canon C100
- Canon 70-200 L f/2.8 IS
- Canon 17-55 f/2.8 IS
Kessler Philip Bloom Slider was also used.
Edited and color corrected in Adobe Premiere.

FOLLOW twitter.com/reelcastprod // facebook.com/reelcast
VISIT reelcastproductions.com

TONIGHT Screening of Storming Papa Doc Feb.2nd-7th

The Storm has begun . . .

We launched the screening of Ayiti Images tour "Storming Papa Doc"  in the community of Coral Gables at the University of Miami last night. 

Tonight, join us at O Cinema in Wynwood at 6pm to see this interesting part of Haitian history and also hear an intimate dialogue with director Mario L. Delatour and special guest moderator , Artist Edouard Duval-Carrie. There will be complimentary Jamaican food catered by Palentino Resturant.

You don't want to miss it! Click here for tickets 
 

ADDITIONAL SCREENING LINKS 


FEB. 3RD TUES @ 6PM 
O CINEMA WYNWOOD 
GET YOUR TICKETS HERE 

FEB. 4TH WED @ 6:30PM 
FIU SOUTH CAMPUS 
RSVP COMPLIMENTARY 

FEB. 6TH FRI @ 7:00PM 
LITTLE HAITI CULTURAL CENTER 
GET YOUR TICKETS HERE 

FEB. 7TH SAT. @ 2PM 
AFRICAN AMERICAN RESEARCH LIB.
FT. LAUDERDALE 
RSVP COMPLIMENTARY  

FEB. 7TH SAT. @ 7PM 
LAKE WORTH PLAYHOUSE 
WEST PALM BEACH COUNTY 
GET YOUR TICKETS HERE 

SEE YOU TONIGHT! 

Really Cool Old Haitian Stamps

TIME - Haiti: Photographers’ Love Affairs With a Country on the Brink

Haiti is country full of paradoxes – one that has inspired many photographers over the last 50 years

Olivier Laurent | Jan. 12, 2015

For decades, as Haiti has weathered political upheavals, coups d’état, economic crises and natural catastrophes—including the devastating earthquake that killed more than 160,000 people in 2010—photographers have nurtured an enduring, and at times tense, relationship with the small Caribbean country.

Haiti’s vibrant society, pulsating energy and stunning light, combined with its tragic and violent history, consistently attract photographers of all ages and nationalities. Many of them are inspired by Alex Webb’s seminal work Under a Grudging Sun, which continues, to this day, to influence their aesthetics.

 

Webb’s first trip to Haiti, back in 1975, transformed him—both as a photographer and as a human being. “I photographed a kind of world I had never experienced before, a world of emotional vibrancy and intensity: raw, disjointed, sometimes beautiful, often tragic,” he tells TIME. “I encountered a world that kept drawing me back, again and again.”

“I have this idea that Haiti chooses you,” echoes photographer Maggie Steber, who first visited the country 35 years ago. “If she doesn’t want you there, she will do everything in her power to make you run screaming for the next plane out of there. But if she likes you, if she recognizes in you a kindred spirit, she doesn’t let you go and she wrings your heart out every day. She uses you up.” Steber’s first experience with Haiti came when she moved to New York after living in Africa; she was missing living abroad and Sipa’s director Gökşin Sipahioğlu suggested that Haiti might satisfy that craving. She arrived just when President Jean-Claude Duvalier fell in a coup d’état.

“Then, everything exploded. It was thrilling. It was exciting. There was so much happening,” she recalls. “For the first time, people could really speak their mind. It was a country finally letting go after taking this deep breath. To me, that’s when the story really started to unfold. That’s when I was spellbound by it.”

When Bruce Gilden first landed in Haiti in 1984, he rented a car with his first wife and, as he was driving to the hotel, he turned to her and said: “Where have I been my whole life?” Since then, Gilden has made 22 visits to the country. “Every time I’d go, I’d find something else to photograph,” he says. The stunning light hooked him first, but the reason he returned so often was all about the people. “They love me and I love them,” he says. “They are my people.”

Together, these photographers and many of their contemporaries have shot, published and exhibited thousands of images of Haiti—many of them with the stated goal of contributing to the dialogue about this “complicated country that has had such a difficult and tragic history,” says Webb. And yet, five years after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed large parts of Haiti and brought unprecedented attention to the country with billions of dollars of aid pledged and hundreds of NGOs setting up operations there, the situation remains grim, calling into question the photographers’ roles.

The deep connection many photographers feel when they first visit Haiti battles against the frustration many of them feel for a country that doesn’t seem to be able to escape its cruel fate.

“I do feel a frustration because every time Haitians try to take a step forward, something happens that sends them back two steps,” Steber tells TIME. “I think it’s frustrating for a lot of photographers.” For the Miami-based photographer, Haiti’s troubled situation can be traced back to the country’s slave revolt in the early 1800s. “Haiti had the only successful slave uprising at a time when the whole world’s economy was rotating around slaves, so the world turned its back on Haiti,” she says. “In a way, Haiti seems to have been punished by fate.”

In the last five years, the number of photographers visiting the small Caribbean country has surged, coinciding with the flock of NGOs pledging to help Haitians recover from the earthquake. While the organizations “are absolutely vital in moments of crisis or natural disaster,” says Institute photographer Paolo Woods, the situation in 2015 tends to show that in the long-term, NGOs’ impact on the country remains ambiguous. “I’m often asked what’s the difference between before and after the earthquake,” Gilden adds. “There’s no difference. Haiti is poor and nobody cares.”

That’s a problem that hits home with photographers too. Though their goal is not the same as NGOs’, the nation’s poverty is ostensibly on display in their work, and they wrestle with how to show that world without harming the people in it. Photography that is not carefully considered can contribute, at times, to the reinforcement of stereotypes frequently applied to developing countries across the globe, from Africa to Latin America to Asia.

“As photographers, we tend to go to places with our eyes and brains already full of images, and very often, unfortunately, we try to confirm those images,” says Paolo Woods, who moved to Haiti five years ago to work on his book State. The photographer doesn’t deny that Haiti is crippled by its unstable political situation and deep-rooted poverty, but, he says, that’s only one side of the story. “When you look at images from Haiti, you get this impression of a country that’s very far away from what it actually is,” he says. “For me, it was just a matter of looking around [to find other stories to tell.]”

Woods only had to look around his hotel, where he stayed during his first month in Haiti, to find his story—one that centers on Haiti’s rich, upper-class population. “It was in December 2010, and we were getting close to the one-year anniversary of the earthquake, so a lot of journalists had come back to Haiti to do a story,” he says. “At that time, I was still living in a hotel in Port-au-Prince where a lot of media people gathered. What astonished me was that in this nice hotel, with working wifi and a swimming pool, you’d have all these photographers getting on motorbikes in the morning to go to Cité Soleil [one of the country’s poorest slums], take hundreds of images, and then come back to the hotel without ever looking at anything else.”

In the same hotel, in its lobby, restaurant and swimming pool, rich Haitians would come to wine and dine. “I thought this was interesting,” says Woods. “Who are these people? How did they make their money? How do they spend it? That became one of the multiple stories that built my book State.”

In his photographs, Gilden has tried to steer clear of the conflicts and the political mess, focusing, instead, on the everyday life of Haitians, whom, he says, he cares deeply about. Yet, his goal was never to change their lives. “I know [photographers] can’t change the world. If [we could], things would not be the same as they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago or 50 years ago.”

Some photographers—Steber and Woods included—have started looking for ways to give back to Haitians, often through photographic workshops. “I teach photography with the goal of encouraging education and to empower Haitians,” says Steber. “We leave the cameras behind and we come back to teach them again and again. It’s about training them to re-seize their country, to appreciate it and to see the possibilities for themselves.”

For Woods, it’s also a way to allow Haiti to be defined, photographically, by its own people. “I often get calls from NGOs, and I always try to refer them to Haitian photographers,” he says. “It makes a lot more sense. I think a country is healthy when its own citizens can tell its story.”

Certainly, Haiti, which is just a two-hour, $200 flight away from Florida, will continue to charm, attract and inspire photographers to produce “significant and deeply committed work, ranging from classical photojournalism to highly interpretive photography,” says Webb. And not just because “the country is poor, or has horrific political violence,” he adds. “There is something about the intense sense of life intertwined with the perpetual presence of death that courses through the society; something about the vibrancy of the people alongside the tragedy of their circumstances; something about a kind of beauty that co-exists with pain and sorrow. Trying to somehow come to terms with such paradoxes may well be a clue as to why the country has inspired—and continues to inspire—photographers as well as writers.”

Olivier Laurent is the editor of TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @olivierclaurent

Alice Gabriner, who edited this photo essay, is TIME’s International Photo Editor.

(source) http://time.com/3663893/haiti-photographers/

WLRN MIAMI - See The Beauty In Haiti With Photographer Maggie Steber's New Show In Coral Gables

By ARIELLE CASTILLO

Picture images of developing countries in American media and you’ll likely think of a few recurring tropes — photos depicting squalid living conditions and political strife.

“We always end up looking at poor countries as being fraught with tragedy and poverty,” says documentary photographer Maggie Steber, in a video trailer for her new solo show opening in Coral Gables on Thursday. “We don’t recognize what is beautiful. We don’t equate what is beautiful.”

Steber’s show, Audacity of Beauty, upends all of those tired visual cliches with a series of arresting color photos culled from over 25 years of shooting in Haiti. While she’s worked in over 62 countries, Steber’s returned frequently to the island country since the early ‘80s, when she first went to document the Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier dictatorship.

Though she arrived, first, with the mission of capturing societal and governmental upheaval, over time, she found new themes for her work there. Beauty survived, in everything from the landscape to the small joys of people’s everyday lives.

It is these moments that make up the body of work in Audacity of Beauty, which sprawls throughout the Leica camera store on Coral Gables’ Miracle Mile. The cool, minimalist store just opened this past March, and besides a full range of Leica products, promises lectures and more exhibitions like Steber’s.

In advance of the opening reception on June 6, we reached Steber by e-mail to ask about her work in Haiti. And Audacity of Beauty, actually, is just one of two bodies of work she’s exhibiting — photography buffs in New York will find another Steber series, Rites of Passage, on view at the local Leica store there. (Click here and then here to read an interview about it on the Leica site.)

WLRN: How did you first start traveling to Haiti? Was it specifically for photography purposes or something else?  

Steber: I lived in Africa from 1978 to 1980 and missed it terribly. My agent at Sipa Press, a French picture agency, suggested I go to Haiti because they needed a story on the dictatorship and widespread poverty. He claimed it was just like Africa and it was. The reason for this is that it is the only successful slave revolt in world history. African slaves in Haiti rose up against their French masters and the world turned its back on Haiti, isolating it so the word of a slave revolt that established a country would not get out (or) encourage others.

WLRN: The web site for the exhibition features a section called “My Favorites” where you’ve picked out nine photos from among those on view. Of these, which are your top three, and what are the stories behind them?

Steber: This is in the slum of Rabato outside the dry dusty town of Gonaives, Haiti. Out of a barren landscape a young girl comes singing and dancing. In Haiti, beauty like this is what you see out of the corner of your eye; it's always unexpected though you know it's there. It's not obvious. The girl represents an elegance and spirit, even in poverty, a dignity.

Steber: Here a young Haitian man rises up in grief at the burial of his mother, who died during pre-election violence, in the National Cemetery in Port-au-Prince, November 1987. The elections were the first held in 30 years after the Duvalier dictatorship was toppled in January 1986.


Steber: In this photo, Haitian soldiers rush in with rifles and batons to stop a boy and hundreds of others from taking food from an aid warehouse in Cap-Haitïen in January, 1986, after a full day of demonstrations against steep food prices they could no longer afford.  Hundreds of people covered the warehouse like ants on a piece of candy. With so much chaos, the army finally pulled back and let the starving people take the food.  

Demonstrations like this one occurred throughout the nation, trickling down to the capital and isolating the dictatorship. One week after this demonstration, the regime fell and flew into exile, liberating Haiti from the 30-year dictatorship of the Duvalier family and the dreaded secret police, the Tonton Macoute.

WLRN: Is it hard for you to really pick “favorite” images, or did these stand out easily for you?

Steber: It's really hard but these photographs represent major events, startling moments, and surprises, and I think they spell out a lot of recent Haitian history since the fall of the Duvalier regime. But it's also the stories behind them that I love or think are important. I would choose more than nine as favorites, but I just love the number nine. It's my number, so there you go.

WLRN: Haiti is a country facing many challenges. Over the years of visiting, was there ever a time at which you felt you might stop shooting there — at least for a long while?  

Steber: I stopped shooting in Haiti in 1988 for about six months. And since the earthquake, when I was there quite a bit, I only go twice a year at most. I'm hoping to change that.

In 1988 I quit thinking I would never return. I was doing a story on a Catholic priest whose church was on the edge of a slum. One Sunday, during a special mass in which everyone wore white and the church doors were locked with chains, just as the mass began, there were loud noises outside the church. Suddenly a gang of about 40 men burst in with guns, machetes, and clubs and began shooting at everyone.  

The priest, who was popular among the parish faithful for his criticism of the government, the wealthy and U.S. interference in Haitian affairs, was whisked away.  People were shot, the pews were flying — it was terrifying. I was trying to take pictures and finally realized I could be killed.  

I ran to the only open exit by the altar, but was blocked by people trying to escape as the men continued to work their way forward. I panicked and ran down the center aisle right into the arms of a man with a machete. He grabbed my shoulder and raised the machete. I looked into his eyes and I saw nothing, no soul. That scared me so badly I turned and ran. He lost his grip on my very old dress which gave way, thank goodness.  

I ran to the blocked exit and pushed everyone forward as hard as I could and by some chance, we fell through and escaped to another area. We were stuck for three hours as the men would come and shoot at us from the walls. They set the church afire. There were bodies everywhere.

Finally, it was quiet and when I went out to get into my car, it had been burned. I hailed a taxi, got back to my hotel, and called the Associated Press with an eyewitness report. I left the next day and thought I would never return — but I did, six months later. Haiti gets in your blood and you can't stay away too long.

WLRN: Why exhibit this particularly body of work now?  

Steber: The new Leica Store on Miracle Mile has a fine gallery space and they want to exhibit the work of premier Leica photographers. Mine will be the second exhibition in the gallery. David Farkas, the manager, likes the Haiti work and [Haitian culture] is a very, very rich part of our community, with fine people who help each other settle into a new land as immigrants here. It makes some sense as we hope the photographs will help the viewers leave knowing something more about their Haitian neighbors here in Miami,
what they escaped from, what they had to leave behind.

WLRN: Why do you shoot Leica? How has the brand helped your style?   

Steber: I have shot Leica cameras most of my career. The lenses are the key to their value and they render color in the most precise way. I have both film and digital cameras, both rangefinders and SLRs, and I recently had the occasion to shoot with the new S2, which is an amazing camera. It’s really lovely.  

But I'm not an equipment geek.  I just want to use something that will see what I saw, and I love the idea that the cameras are my buddies out on an adventure. Silly as it might sound, I think they make me a better, more careful, more subtle and braver photographer. They are my partners in crime!

The opening reception for Audacity of Beauty is at 7 p.m., Thursday, June 6 at the Leica Store Miami, 372 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables. Admission is free with RSVP to info@leicastoremiami.com. Call 305-921-4433 or visit leicastoremiami.com

Naturally Haiti

Ciné Institute founder, David Belle’s film "Naturally Haiti" is a visual parade of color, creativity and ingenuity. Surrounded by the decay and rubble of 2010’s earthquake. Belle searches out and finds creation in the midst of destruction as Haitian artisans take what raw materials are naturally available to transform them into beauty crafts that resonate with the cultural richness of Haiti. As the film opens, Donna Karan searches the island for handcrafted treasure, hitting pay dirt off the beaten track, surrounded by the natural beauty of Haiti and the beautiful faces of its people.


Metal Magic

The artisans of Croix des Bouquets are magicians. They turn recycled oil drums into intricate fantasies of texture and pattern -- sometimes decorative, sometimes infused with vodou, Haiti's rich, syncretic spiritual tradition. HAND/EYE Fund's video shows beauty of what in this Haitian cultural capital, just outside Port au Prince.