Born in Ger­many in 1981, I always had a great curios­i­ty about dif­fer­ent peo­ples and their cul­tures. But as I trav­elled the world and doc­u­ment­ed my jour­neys with pho­tographs, I realised that I want­ed to know more about the peo­ple I met along the way. I wasn’t sat­is­fied with just scratch­ing the sur­face, I want­ed to dig deep­er and decid­ed to use my cam­era to tell sto­ries about the peo­ple and the con­di­tions under which they live.

My first such sto­ry takes place in Haiti. Often reduced to being ‘The poor­est coun­try in the west­ern hemi­sphere’ by the news media, I want­ed to know what life in Haiti is real­ly like. What I found dur­ing my explo­rations was a place full of con­tro­ver­sy: Haiti has beau­ti­ful land­scapes, a rich cul­tur­al her­itage and a fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry — in short, every­thing it would take to build a tourist indus­try — and yet it still remains a poor coun­try with a host of com­pli­cat­ed problems.

The some­times well-inten­tioned solu­tions imposed on Haiti by the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, have in-part, con­tributed to the sit­u­a­tion that the coun­try finds itself in today. Too fre­quent­ly, Haiti had to bear the con­se­quences of ill-con­ceived devel­op­ment and glob­al­i­sa­tion projects. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true for its rur­al peo­ple and impov­er­ished city pop­u­la­tion. And yet pre­cise­ly these peo­ple remain proud and self-con­fi­dent and find ways to make their liv­ing amidst incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances. This is the sto­ry that ‘Of Pigs and Men’ wants to tell.

From expe­ri­ence, many peo­ple in Haiti are sus­pi­cious against for­eign­ers tak­ing pic­tures of them, fear­ing that it is, yet again, about the stereo­typ­i­cal por­tray­al of their caribbean home coun­try as a place full of dis­as­ter and chaos. It thus was an impor­tant part of my work dur­ing my vis­it to Haiti to per­suade the locals that such a one-sided depic­tion of their coun­try was not my inten­tion, but that I instead want­ed to tell the pos­i­tive sto­ry of the Hait­ian pig and how it gives (eco­nom­ic) inde­pen­dence to its owners.

Two peo­ple that were of great help in this respect were Gislet from the Mou­ve­ment Pey­izan Bay­on­nais (MPB) and Sarah from the Mou­ve­ment Pey­izan Papaye (MPP). Both are local­ly very well-con­nect­ed and could pro­vide me with impor­tant infor­ma­tion on the issue and give me access to peo­ple and places that I oth­er­wise wouldn‘t have been able to get to know. Thanks for your sup­port in com­plet­ing my project!

For feed­back on the project or if inter­est­ed in the pic­tures please con­tact me at contact@florianwiddel.com