The collapse of Enron, with its web of offshore companies, got Paolo Woods talking with a photo editor. As big as the story was, the editor told him, he was hard pressed to figure out just how to illustrate something rooted in a thicket of secretive corporations that — on paper, at least — were based in tax havens. Nondescript post office boxes were not exactly the stuff of great images.
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.
It’s hard enough for outsiders to know what’s even going on in tax havens, those notoriously secretive places where taxes are levied at absurdly low rates. Photographing what they look like is almost impossible—but Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti have done it in The Heavens, which Dewi Lewis published in September.
There’s more to Institute photographer Paolo Woods’ series Pepe than meets the eye. Teaming up with photographer Ben Depp, the two capture numerous Haitians sporting T-shirts of various declarations. The portraits are lighthearted and yet simultaneously r
There’s more to Institute photographer Paolo Woods‘ series Pepe than meets the eye. Teaming up with photographer Ben Depp, the two capture numerous Haitians sporting T-shirts of various declarations. The portraits are lighthearted and yet simultaneously reveal an irony born from the larger workings of globalization. “Pepe” are what local Haitians call the second-hand garments that typically arrive from the U.S. to Port au Prince’s market, Croix-des-Bossales.
Paolo Woods doesn’t want to take a picture you’ve already seen. Although it seems like a given, Woods—who has created photography series around the world—said that he used to battle against making the obvious image. He discovered he was doing a disservice to himself as a photographer and to those around him in various countries who were opening up doors to worlds he hadn’t previously seen.
Having realized “there was much more to Iran than just political turmoil and religious fundamentalism,” Paolo Woods set out to capture it, as Eirini Vourloumis reports.
“I knew I was on the wrong path photographically,” Paolo Woods recalled. “I had first started photographing by what I had seen in other photographs of the country and what my colleagues were shooting. I recognized there was a way of dramatizing with black-and-white film, which I was not comfortable with anymore. I realized quickly that there was much more to Iran than just political turmoil and religious fundamentalism.”
