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Two Months Before - Haiti - The Mountain People

Peter Pereira/4SEE

Two months before the tragedy, photographer Peter Pereira went to Haiti's mountains to photograph the poorest of the poor in Haiti.

"High on the mountain, somewhere under its thick green foliage exists a hidden community. Unlike the typical village with roads radiating from a central location, in the mountains of Haiti people are hidden from sight. No community center, no street names, just rough clay roads that wind up and down the rugged mountainsides. Smaller paths are cut into the foliage on the side of the main road, leading you into the spaces between the foliage where people have made their homes.

What I saw was at times wonderful, at times saddening. It was wonderful to be constantly greeted by welcoming smiles that radiated from these humble people, but sad to see how little they have, and how bleak their future looks. One occasion I walked onto a clearing to find a family washing their clothes, children playing with a well-used soccer ball. In a tiny room in the family home a young man was making a small chair from wood, in hopes of selling it to a tourist in the city below. In another instance, exactly one week before Thanksgiving back home in New Bedford, I found myself looking on as a mother sitting on the hard-packed ground cooked the evening's dinner for her husband and her three children with the help of a small fire and a large pot. This meal was a simple combination of corn paste and a soup made of water and beans. This is what they ate yesterday. It's what they will eat tomorrow."

Find out in Peter's pictures how Haiti's mountain people lived above Carrefour.

 

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Lens Peter Pereira

 

Metamorfose Book

Peter Pereira featured in "Lens" from The New York Times
Peter Pereira/4SEE

Peter Pereira's experience in Haiti while visiting the country two months before 12th January Earthquake, is featured in "Lens", the photography blog from The New York Times.

The work on Haiti's Mountain people is also in "OneRèspe" a 40-page publication intended to raise money for the victims. He did. So did Mary Ellen Mark, Chet Gordon, Kari Hartmann and Lindsay Stark.

See Peter's work on Haiti's Mountain People here.

Metamorfose - António Luís Campos new book

António Luís Campos presents Metamorphosis, a photo album that reveals butterflies' inner world in a journey along 234km-long Mondego River. From the source, in Serra da Estrela, to it's estuary at Figueira da Foz, over one hundred pictures show an approach simultaneously aesthetic and scientific, focusing several aspects of these ephemeral insect's life. Merging art and science, Metamorphosis presents 140 pages of exuberant, elegant color and form in Nature.

 

See "Nocturne Butterflies" work by António in our archive.

Latest Stories

 


The Ways to Santiago
Alberto Paredes/4SEE

2010 will be celebrated as a Holy Compostellan year. Whenever July 25 falls on a Sunday the Galician government's Xacobeo tourism campaign is unleashed once more. Last Compostellan year was 2004 and the number of pilgrims increased to almost 200.000 people.

Pilgrims from all over the world come to cross Spain on foot since the Middle Ages. The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, where tradition says that the body and head of St. James was buried, has long been regarded as important as Rome and Jerusalem in terms of Christian religious significance, a site worthy to be a pilgrimage destination for over a thousand years. In addition to people undertaking a religious pilgrimage, there are many travellers and hikers who nowadays walk the route for non-religious reasons: travel, sport, or simply the challenge of weeks of walking in a foreign land. They can follow many routes but the most popular route is the French Way or Camino Francés. Historically, most of the pilgrims came from France, due to the Codex Calixtinus, a 12th century illuminated manuscript intended as an anthology of background detail and advice for pilgrims following the Way.

These pictures are a graphic diary of Alberto Paredes journeys through 2.500 kilometers, following the main routes of this medieval footpath in Spain:

 

See The French Way pictures

See The Silver Way pictures

Transsexual Lifes
Jordi Pizarro/4SEE

The stories of Antoinette and Samantha could be ones of women fighting for their rights. But first they are stories of men fighting to be women.

Samantha is a female transexual who has battled to defend the rights of transexuals in Latin America, to the point that she was forced to seek political asylum in Spain due to death threats she received from armed groups in her home country, Colombia.

Antoinette just got married to Emilio gaining the right of beeing considered a woman, thus changing her name to a feminine one.

Both stories crossed in Barcelona's streets where both used to work as prostitutes. Now they are putting that behind and they are finally starting to live a normal life

See all pictures from this story

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