Through the Eyes of Haitian Children opening at Venice Arts

MEDIA ALERT Contact: Elysa Voshell, Venice Arts 310–578-1745 | elysa@venice-arts.org WHAT: Through the Eyes of Haitian Children, photographs of Haitian life taken before and after the devastating earthquake by youth participants in the Haiti-based project Zanmi Lakay (Haitian Creole for Friend’s Home). The project has been working with street children in Haiti for over 13 years, and was recently featured on “Lens,” the photo blog of the New York Times. The Price of Sugar, a film screening about Haitians working in slave-like conditions in the Dominican ...

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Article on our students work at the Palm Beach Photo Centre

A nice article that includes Zanmi Lakay's photography students from Art Creation Foundation for Children and their participation in a show at the Palm Beach Photographic Center - so proud!

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Haiti Blog Update #5…finally

It has been very difficult for me to finish our report and re-visit our experiences in Haiti from January and February, to put together words and photographs showing what we did and what it was like. When people ask us how our trip was, the answer is elusive or short…it was bad, but we do what we can. I keep saying that Haiti was bad on a good day, but if you’ve never been to Haiti then it’s hard to understand. The devastation after the January 12th earthquake that measured 7.0 at 4:53 pm was so widespread and the needs so great that at first I was saying it was ...

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Back to Port-au-Prince during the Weekend of Prayer

President Preval designated Friday Feb. 12-14 a weekend of prayer and all businesses were closed. We drove back to Port-au-Prince on that Friday (lucky we bought gas Thursday afternoon), and the road over the mountain from Jacmel was much better although still only one lane in some places. An especially dangerous curve had a crack with a drop off of over 14”.  Further down the road almost at Carrefour we had to stop and pull the car over because the street was filled with hundreds of people chanting and praying.  Coming into Port-au-Prince I began to notice the word ...

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Art Creation Foundation for Children (ACFFC)

We spent much of our time working in Jacmel with artists, with young adults in our programs, but mostly with the 60-80 children of Art Creation Foundation for Children (ACFFC). Because there was no school happening after the earthquake, we knew a top priority was to create activities for the kids, and we made a lot of plans. The children were all busy making art, mostly paper maché birds at that time. We got about half of them started on a serious digital Photography Workshop giving out eight assignments while sharing cameras, but each student was able to do some reshoo...

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Jacmel 2010

When we drove into downtown Jacmel the first thing we saw was the completely collapsed gas station. One of the hardest hit neighborhoods was the historical area and some of my favorite buildings were marked with a red check meaning they were condemned. Rubble from the main building collapse at Hotel Cyvadier was being crushed by men with simple tools and transported with wheelbarrows, and this was the case all over. When we went to give hundreds of pounds of medical supplies to the Jacmel Hospital, we saw the condemned church across the street and met the priest who had ...

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Papouche

The first time I met Papouche he was 8-years old and living at Lafanmi Selavi, a home where hundreds of street children lived and went to school, bathed and ate everyday. I have photographed him more than any other child I know in Haiti for the simple fact that he loved having his picture taken, even when he was feeling shy or in a bad mood. I watched him through the years as he grew taller than me. When Lafanmi Selavi closed in 1999, Papouche had no where to go and was living back out on the streets. I didn't know what happened to him until one night we discovered him in ...

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