The New York Times paid tribute to famed Haitian photographer, Gérald Bloncourt, in a recent obituary.
Read an excerpt below:
Gérald Bloncourt, who after being expelled from Haiti for his role in antigovernment protests in 1946 went to Paris and turned his zeal for social justice into photography that captured the humanity of immigrants and factory workers, died on Oct. 29 in Paris. He was 91.
His wife, Isabelle Bloncourt-Repiton, said the cause was complications of melanoma.
Mr. Bloncourt was born on Nov. 4, 1926, in Bainet, Haiti, and as a child moved with his family to the southern port town of Jacmel after a devastating hurricane. His father, Yves, who was from Guadeloupe, was a coffee and vegetable farmer who later became a top government sports official in Haiti. His mother, Noémie Calleri, whose parents were Italian, grew up in the south of France, taught in Paris and ran schools in Jacmel and Port-au-Prince, the capital.
He was born during the 19-year United States occupation of Haiti, which was ordered by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 in response to unrest surrounding the assassination of a Haitian president. Mr. Bloncourt recalled the occupation with loathing. The Americans, he wrote on his blog, “did not hide their contempt for Haitians, regardless of social category.”
Gérald began painting as a youngster, and in the mid-1940s, when he was only 17, he was one of several founders of the Haiti Art Center, which provided instruction and exhibition space to a broad range of local artists.
“This was the spark that set fire to the powder and caused the explosion of the great painters,” he told Kreyolicious, a website dedicated to Haitian culture, in 2012.
Mr. Bloncourt’s passion for chronicling the everyday dignity of exploited peoples found a particular focus in Portuguese émigrés who had fled authoritarian rule and conscription to seek jobs in construction and factories in postwar France. For several years, he followed them, on foot and by train, from their villages to makeshift slums outside Paris, where their odysseys ended in renewed hardship in a foreign land.
“I wanted to use my photos as a weapon in hopes to change the world,” he said in Paris in 2013 at an exhibition of his photographs at the Palais de la Porte Dorée.
Read the full tribute to Monsieur Bloncourt over at the NYT.
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