Getxophoto – Paolo Woods, Pepe – The Eye of Photography

In the 1960s, during Kennedy’s term of office, the United States began to export second hand clothes to underdeveloped countries. This activity grew in the 1980s and since then it is millions of tons that are sent each year to the third world, representing a very large business trade, made to the detriment of local economies and labour conditions in these countries. Croix-des-Bossales market, in Port-au-Prince, was a place devoted to the sale of slaves and, today, it receives on a daily basis containers of clothes rejected by North Americans. Many of these garments –popularly known in Haiti by the Creole term Pepe– have actually been produced by Haitians and they come back to them at affordable prices with ridiculous messages printed in the USA like Kiss me, I am blonde, which no-one has bothered themselves to translate. Woods portrays Haitian citizens wearing these T-shirts and in so doing, with no loss of irony, depicts fifty years of North-South relations.