Haiti, Mon Amour

Haiti Mon Amour, a found photography exhibition featuring profile pics from personal ads on Haitianconnection.com, is a strangely familiar stew of eroticism, anxiety, and hope. Anyone who has spent an idle hour strolling through the pages on a social networking site will recognize the aesthetic conventions at work here: the continuum of slightly to very unnatural poses, the self-aggrandizing text overlays, the airbrushed backdrops. One might expect these snapshots to convey some element of their “exotic” context and yet what we find here is the furthest thing from foreign.

Apparently, this feeling of intimacy shared with a previously unknown population is exactly what the curators had hoped to foster: “After the devastation that the earthquake on 12th January 2010 has caused, and the subsequent media coverage of their plight, we at As-found think it’s pertinent to show Haitians according to their own self-image and means.” This statement is rightfully followed by a link to Unicef so patrons of this digital gallery can make a donation to disaster relief efforts, perchance to benefit some of the very individuals whose lives they have glimpsed therein.

It’s kind of a bold move to try to generate sympathy for a group of people by humanizing them rather than simply rendering them as objects of pity. Humans are weird and boring and awkward, probably most of all when they are deliberately trying to make themselves appear more sexually attractive. The fact is, we are far more likely to throw money at a picture of a crying baby being pried from the wreckage of a collapsed building than one of a cute guy with a crooked smile leaning uncomfortably on the capital of a miniature column, yet both of them are equally worthy of our compassion. Perhaps Haiti Mon Amour will serve best as a reminder to be more aware of our connection to others in mundane moments as well as tragic ones.