Transcript
NIGEL BAKER
Only about 10 minutes before I took this photograph, I had a gun pulled to my head. In fact, our entire crew had guns pulled to their heads, and our guides had to have a, a gun off with them. It's a very scary moment for me and for everyone. We saw things that, you know, most people would never see. We went to places that Haitians had never been, right deep into Cite Soleil, where the police force hadn't even been for over a decade.
UNIK ERNEST
We promise you tonight we are going to change Haiti.
NIGEL BAKER
You know, I've never really understood the whole concept of celebrity. I sort of became one by default. I got involved with America's Next Top Model. Tyra was a friend of mine. She was, oh, would you help out? Would you be a photographer on the show? I said, yeah, great. And then, all of a sudden, people were coming up to you and they're, hey, I love your show and what have you, and listening to what I had to say and repeating what I had to say. And I thought, well, what can I do with this?
One of the great things about Edeyo is it's about education, it's about building schools. And through education, the next generation of Haitians can learn to help themselves.
Right here, this is right in the heart of Cite Soleil. And this is a little, young boy. And I call this photograph, Courage. He wasn’t begging. He was looking at us and he was saying, why? What's going on?
This lady we found in the middle of a slum in Cite Soleil. And actually, what's she's doing, it looks very, very beautiful, very decent, very normal. But actually, these are scraps of material that she had found. She's sewing them together on a manual sewing machine, and she's making garments from scraps. That's the kind of ingenuity you need if you're gonna get on in Port-au-Prince.
I almost got into a fight when I took this picture, so I placed my camera on the table, there's a very small layer of, um, of focus. The only thing in focus is the money. Everything else is out of focus. These guys were gambling. And that 250 gourdes is worth about a quarter, so they were gambling like it was their lifesavings. It was very interesting, not quite the Vegas we're used to.
Beauty could be found in anything. You look at these pictures. Yes, they're raw, yes, they're hard, yes, they're difficult, but there's color here and there's hope here. And with hope, there's opportunity. And I think that's what this exhibition represents. I feel very honored that I can sort of do a shoot like this and people will actually gonna react to it and we can raise tens of thousands of dollars that are actually gonna help people.
