Haiti Holdup: Darren Ell

HAITI : HOLDUP DARREN ELL

curated by

RAE STASESON

HAITI:HOLDUP

TABLE OF CONTENTS

H A I T I : HOL D UP

CURATORIAL FOREWORD Rae Staseson

4 – 5

ARTIST’S STATEMENT Darren Ell

6 – 7

4

THE DAMAGE BEFORE THE DISASTER: REFIGURING HAITIAN SUFFERING IN HAITI : HOLDUP Lisa Lynch

14 – 17

HAITI : HOLDUP: BEARING WITNESS TO CANADIAN COMPLICITY Joseph Rosen

18 – 20

BIOGRAPHIES

22 – 23

CREDITS

24 – 25

HAITI : HOLDUP

Port-au-Prince

February 2nd 2008

8 – 9

Port-au-Prince

February 1st 2008

10 – 11

Port-au-Prince

February 1st 2008

12 – 13

Exhibition View I

17

Exhibition View II

21

CURATORIAL FOREWORD Rae Staseson

HAITI:HOLDUP

H A I T I : HOL D UP 6

I have had the pleasure of knowing Darren Ell for over a decade. During this time, I have watched his work progress immensely as he solidified a commitment to his role as an artist-activist. Ell’s work has always been about looking, about moments, about sharing the stories that may not be obvious but must be told. His exhibit in our Media Gallery, Haiti : Holdup, was a stunning installation of three large photographs taken during the 2008 UN-led arrest operation in the Cité-de-Dieu neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.

The scale of the photographs allowed the viewer to feel like a participant – as if he or she was just across the street, observing the event, witnessing a moment, or happening upon the aftermath of something terrifying and suspicious.

Ell’s exhibition opened one day after the devastating earthquake in Haiti. We had just finished the installation when the news of this horrible event began to break. Before the gallery doors opened, Ell put together information sheets about how to help Haiti during this time of crisis. In this context, the exhibition became even more provocative, with new layers of meaning attached to Ell’s urban images.

The streets in the photographs were probably gone, and those people in the images were now likely part of the thousands dead in the rubble.

HAITI : HOLDUP

Art can provide an experience with the unexpected, and offer a new insight on how we think about the world. I believe that Haiti : Holdup has provided us something that most of us involved in the exhibition have never experienced, and will never have the opportunity to experience again. Dr. Lisa Lynch from the Department of Journalism and Dr. Joseph Rosen from Communication Studies have provided excellent short essays with insightful and rigorous thoughts on the exhibition, on documentary photography, and on bearing witness. The Mobile Media Lab, as always, has been a tremendous collaborator of the Media Gallery, and I appreciate the ongoing opportunity for us to disseminate creative and critical media work together in new, inspiring ways. Thank you to the Department of Communication Studies for the constant expert support, and most particularly to Henry Lemmetti for his enthusiasm and passion for making things perfect. Lastly, thank you to Darren Ell for producing a profound and powerful series of photographs that will continue to resonate as important documents of global injustice and corruption.

RAE STASESON Gallery Director and Exhibition Curator, 2010.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT Darren Ell

HAITI:HOLDUP The themes central to my artistic practice can be found in the discourses of post-colonialism and documentary photography. The work is informed by the legacy of colonialism, the impact of imperialism and globalization, displacement and exile, socio-economic inequality, injustice, human rights, truth in documentary photography, the responsibility of bearing witness, and art as a tool of social transformation.

H A I T I : HOL D UP 8

As a photographer, I am interested in the photograph’s simultaneous existence as document and tableau, and in its ability to exist both as an index of reality and as a representation, that is, as an image. I enjoy exploiting its purely denotative ability – its accurate visual description of a particular place at a particular time – as well as its connotative powers – its ability to evoke meanings that transcend the specificity of the captured moment. I strive to produce artwork that can speak to a specific socio-political situation, evoke a larger socio-political condition, and point to its causes and consequences. I am interested in subject matter with a discernible local-global connection, rooted in my locality but connected to a larger global concern.

I have found that a single photograph is inadequate for dealing with the complex issues I explore. I tend to use a variety of visual approaches in my practice, such as landscape, portraiture, and images of public and private spaces grouped into triptychs. The images are often complemented by audio interviews, video projections, witness statements, biographies, and historical texts – all of which anchor, inform, and weaponize the images.

Explanation, advocacy, and provocation are important components of my artwork. I choose issues that are misrepresented or downplayed in mainstream media, and are

HAITI : HOLDUP

therefore poorly understood by the public, but are also nonetheless important on both a local and global scale.

They are issues that challenge modernist notions of progress and Western superiority. My point of view is often contrary to prevailing public opinion. For example, studies reveal that most Canadians see Canada’s role as positive in the world. My work, however, looks at the damaging effects of Canadian policies on people from Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Russia, Somalia, Turkey, Columbia, and Haiti. The act of challenging received truths requires several years of factual research for each of my projects. Collaboration is an important component of this process: I work with researchers, investigative journalists, activists, and lawyers in order to acquire an in-depth understanding of my chosen issues.

Since all of my projects focus on victimized groups of people, I involve myself in their struggle as an artist-citizen. During the two to three years it takes to complete a project, I engage in journalism and activism to bring their causes to a larger audience. This in turn generates interest in my artwork.

Social change requires sustained collective action. A body of artwork, no matter how well-executed, engaged, and widely-viewed it may be, will not alone change the outcome of the issues it addresses. However, to the extent that the art gallery can be a meditative space for reflection and a venue for counter-hegemonic voices, the exhibited work can raise consciousness and fulfil the ameliorative role of documentary-based artwork.

DARREN ELL January 2010

Appliances H A I T I : HOL D UP 10

London, Ontario 2006 digital C-print 16½ x 17 in. edition of 5

Port-au-Prince, February 2nd, 2008.

Smoke from extinguished burning tires, student demonstration against the high cost of living in Haiti.

Digital print 58 x 87 inches. Edition of 6.

H A I T I : HOL D UP 12

Port-au-Prince, February 1st, 2008.

Arrest operation conducted without arrest warrants by UN forces and Haitian SWAT in CitĂŠ de Dieu neighborhood. Digital print 58 x 87 inches. Edition of 6.

H A I T I : HOL D UP 14

Port-au-Prince, February 1st, 2008.

Arrest operation conducted without arrest warrants by UN forces and Haitian SWAT in CitĂŠ de Dieu neighborhood. Digital print 58 x 87 inches. Edition of 6.

ESSAY

The Damage Before The Disaster: Refiguring Haitian Suffering in Haiti : Holdup

H A I T I : HOL D UP 16

Darren Ell’s installation Haiti : Holdup documents a controversial episode in the recent political history of Haiti: the involvement of UN forces in a series of politically motivated and procedurally murky arrests of Haitian citizens. Combining large-scale images with contextual information and a video piece that lists the names of the arrested, Haiti : Holdup immerses the viewer in the events Ell has recorded. Standing in direct contradiction to mainstream media’s portrait of Haiti as both the damaged recipient of Western benevolence and an anarchic nation in need of outside “peacekeeping” intervention, Haiti : Holdup is a transformed work of photojournalism that foregrounds the complementary yet fraught relationship between that genre and fine art photography.

Ell’s method and subject matter place him in a distinguished cohort of documentary photographers whose work has gained artistic recognition, such as James Natchwey and the former Magnum photographers Sebastião Salgado and Luc Delahaye. Like these photographers, Ell’s focus is the transformative representation of oppression, suffering, and conflict. This shared interest carries with it a shared burden: as Erina Duganne notes in her catalog essay for the photography exhibit Beautiful Suffering, the attempt to create art from the pain of others is always a tricky proposition, a project open

to the claim that aestheticizing suffering neutralizes or commodifies it.1 Ever since Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange sparred over the representational strategies in their images of Depressionera Americans, documentary photographers have anticipated and resisted the charge of aestheticization in markedly different ways. The nuances of Ell’s approach become clearer when the aesthetics of the images in Haiti : Holdup are contrasted against those of Luc Delahaye, a photographer who also created works of fine art while carrying out journalistic assignments. In order to create the works in his acclaimed History series, Delahaye carried a Linhof panoramic camera along with his regular equipment, switching equipment as he alternated between conventional work for periodicals such as Newsweek and the production of pictures that eschewed the methods and conventions of photojournalism. The critic Michael Fried has said of Delahaye’s images: There is in all of them a strong sense of distance, even withdrawal on the part of the photographer; a strong impression of deliberate non-engagement, not, one feels, in the interest of reportorial objectivity so much as in pursuit of an artistic – ultimately an ontological – ideal of allowing the picture in all of its density

HAITI : HOLDUP

both of reference and of color to come into being of its own accord.2

photojournalism and its attendant possibility of compassion fatigue. 3

As Fried suggests, Delahaye’s choices – an approach to production and framing that “cool” his photographs to the point where they become almost autopoetic in their production of aesthetic meaning – are one way of wrestling with the uneasiness that comes from the aestheticization of suffering. His refusal of reportorial objectivity enables the images to float free of their representational baggage, deliberately restricting their traffic in the world of the real.

This is not to say that the images of Haiti : Holdup read as conventional works of news photography. The very scale of the photographs – nearly five by seven feet in size – lend the images and the events they depict a monumental status, a strategy Ell has deployed previously in his portraits of individuals caught in struggles with Citizenship and Immigration Canada (Between States). In the arrest images, what is most striking to the viewer is Ell’s confrontational intimacy.

Shot with a medium-wide lens (Nikkor 18-55), their closeness to their subjects comes from Ell’s own closeness to the activity at hand, in the face of a tense and possibly dangerous situation that would seem to call for a telephoto lens and respectful distance. Ell has remarked that his choice to move in close to his subjects was both deliberate and interventional:

In contrast, Ell’s work seeks to directly negotiate with the world beyond his lens.

His images, grounded in a series of truth claims that are dependent on reportorial objectivity, privilege intimacy and engagement over distance and detachment.

The two untitled arrest images in Haiti : Holdup are shot at close range with a photojournalist’s arsenal of equipment (a Nikon digital SLR), and they were taken while Ell, in the company of Haitian journalists and carrying a press pass, acted in the capacity of documentary photojournalist. For Ell, the transformative gesture that defines his work is thus neither purely formal nor purely intentional; it lies rather in the presentation and contextualization of his images in a manner that resists the decontextualization of

I was told several times by peacekeepers to stay back, but I stayed close to what was happening and then just kept taking carefully framed photos. After taking the main photo you see in the exhibition (with the peacekeeper in the middle), the SWAT member came over and put his hand over my camera and ordered me to stop, so I stopped at that point.4

ESSAY

H A I T I : HOL D UP 18

Ell’s decision to move into the action brings to mind a trope of photojournalism, the “disaster closeup” intended to give the viewer a sense of the human dimension of suffering in the event of war, famine, or natural catastrophe. But the chief characteristics of images of disaster victims – pathos, universality, and the invisibility of the photographic apparatus – are absent here. 5 There is no sense of pathos in these images, and though we do not know who the arrest victims are, our understanding of the facts, locations, and circumstances of their arrest gives them a great deal of particularly. As for the photographic apparatus, in each of the arrest photographs, one of the photographed subjects glares defiantly back at Ell (and the viewer): in one, it is a clearly annoyed UNAMID member; while in the other, a bystander, manning an ad hoc ‘telephone office,’ stares coolly back at the camera as if claiming the right of prior witness.

If the first two images in Ell’s tableau are a photographic record of what he identifies as illegal arrests, then the third image in Ell’s tableau records the aftermath of an event that we do not get to see. This lush, atmospheric photo shows a haze of smoke lingering in a tree-filled courtyard after burning tires have been extinguished at the end of a student protest.

Suffusing the shot with a sort of pasto-

ral mistiness, the smoke both suggests and occludes what has happened before the photograph is taken, providing what Ulrich Baer has described as “spectral evidence” of a traumatic, inaccessible event.6 The elegiac quality of this photo also forms a poignant counterpart to the last object in the installation: a video that uses three languages of address (English, French, and Creole) to display the names and alleged crimes of 117 Haitians over the course of its half-hour run time. Though Ell did not intend this, the video now signals doubly as a memorial to these prisoners; the names, projected slowly and soundlessly against a black background, not only identify victims of a collective political tragedy, they are also the names of prisoners whose fate in the wake of the Haitian earthquake remains uncertain. This double signification of the memorial video leaves the viewer with the sense that Ell’s work at once captures a vanished moment, and, in eerily prescient fashion, suggests the overdetermination that makes Haiti’s current catastrophe so difficult to picture clearly, no matter what the lens, no matter what the vantage point.

Lisa Lynch

HAITI : HOLDUP

Installation view, Media Gallery, Communication Studies, 2010.

Notes: Erina Duganne, “Photography After The Fact,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 57-74.

2 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 184.

3 Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3 (Spring-Summer 2004), 435-449.

1

Darren Ell, email correspondence, Januar y 24, 2010.

5 Jo Ellen Fair and Lisa Parks, “Africa on Camera: Television News Coverage and Aerial Imaging of Rwandan Refugees,” Africa Today 48:2 (Summer 2001), 35-57.

6 Baer, Ulrich, Spectral Evidence: The Photograph of Trauma (Boston: MIT Press 2005), intro.

4

ESSAY

Haiti : Holdup: Bearing Witness to Canadian Complicity

H A I T I : HOL D UP 20

Darren Ell’s Haiti : Holdup—which opened within a day of the disastrous earthquake in Haiti—documents scenes of violence from the last decade in Haiti, and provokes questions about international circuits of financial and military aid. Ell’s work traverses the line between art practice and political activism in order to engage the viewer with what Ell calls the “responsibility to bear witness.” But what, exactly, do these images witness? And what differentiates a responsible form of witnessing from disaster voyeurism?

The exhibit’s most seductive image depicts a somewhat ghostly landscape: a tree, a pathway, and luminescent smoke drifting in through an open gate. The smoke, diffusely illuminated from behind, recalls other political images: a dustfilled lower Manhattan after 9/11; the burning oil fields of Kuwait from the first Gulf War. Aesthetically, Ell’s photograph evokes Romantic landscape painting of the 18th and 19th centuries (one thinks of Claude Joseph Vernet’s cloud-filled scenes of storms and shipwrecks) and invokes the sublime: the aesthetic expression of the inexpressible. The sublime is commonly represented through the tempestuous violence of nature (as in the case of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans).1 But as Boris Groys reminds us, the aesthetics of the sublime

are historically grounded in a specific political violence: Edmund Burke originally conceptualized the sublime in reference to the public beheadings and torture that took place during the French Revolution.2 When news of this revolt reached Haiti, it triggered the 1791 slave uprising.

Ell anchors his sublime landscape in the lingering after-effects of this anti-colonial revolution. As Ell’s caption informs the viewer, the image shows smoke emanating from fires extinguished after a student demonstration against the high cost of living. The ghostly smoke thus bears witness to a political violence inextricable from the history of colonization, and from the present neo-colonial global financial system that manufactures unbearable debt in the global South.

Across the room, one shifts from sublime landscape to police portraiture: two images of illegal arrest operations in Portau-Prince. One image shows three police officers standing over prone and handcuffed people. Two black police officers holding guns stand on either side, toward the back. In front and centre-stage, a white officer in a different uniform holds a phone, appearing to command the scene. Are they national or international, military or private? How does race structure the relationship between these security forces? And what is the connection between humanitarian aid and

HAITI : HOLDUP

militarization?3 In the next image, a heavily armed Haitian SWAT team stands guard in front of a bank. Are they protecting the bank? For whom? Are looters en route? It’s hard not to be reminded of the incessant coverage, in the second week after the earthquake, of what U.S. and Canadian media portray as ‘looting.’

The parallels to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are worth remembering: widespread reportage of looting, murders, gang rapes—subsequently proved false—were exaggerated and over-reported. Why? Natural disasters seem to provide a stage upon which the European imagination can project Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’: the war of all against all. Does the obsession with looting work to legitimize the role of international security forces?4 Questions of security forces and global economics are at the heart of Haiti : Holdup—but who’s holding up who? The images bear witness to political violence, but it is unclear, visually, where this violence originates or who is responsible.

The photographs prompt a variety of questions about international aid—both military and economic—and seem, in some way, to bear witness to the violences of globalization. But what differentiates Ell’s form of artistic witness from virtual disaster tourism? Images of violence—both artistic and journalis-

tic—provoke many questions about the relation between aesthetics, politics and consumer culture. What happens when we aestheticize violence? What does it mean to take aesthetic pleasure in representations of violence? Do sublime images depoliticize history: rendering supposedly ‘natural’ the violent results of human action? How do these images intersect with a fetishistic form of voyeurism? Does the political violence of global ‘others’ become an aesthetic landscape for the neo-colonial tourist? And what, exactly, is the role of the artist or journalist in relation to this disaster-voyeurism? What does it mean to consume images of global suffering—and from where is the viewer watching?

Haiti : Holdup offers a provocative response to these dilemmas. The politics of Ell’s practice of witnessing is found in the historical information posted on the gallery wall. A brief timeline sketches out the recent history of Haiti: a democratic election subsequently destabilized by international forces; the installation of a non-elected government, followed by repression, murder, and sexual assault.

This somewhat familiar plot evokes the history of American covert operations in Latin America and the Caribbean. But here—and this is the anti-voyeuristic force of the exhibit—Ell highlights questions of Canadian culpability. First, Can-

ESSAY

H A I T I : HOL D UP 22

ada contributes to the destabilization of Aristide’s government by cutting off financial aid. Second, and more ominously, Canadian troops are subsequently deployed in Haiti; not only are they present, but they train and select the security forces that oversee a period of politically motivated arrests and political repression, including 8,000 murders and 35,000 sexual assaults. So, while documenting violent and illegal arrests in Haiti, Ell not only highlights the problems of military and humanitarian aid in an era of globalization—he bears witness to Canadian involvement, complicity and culpability in the history Haiti’s destabilization. 5 Haiti : Holdup thus avoids the aesthetic trap of virtual disaster tourism by connecting the supposedly ‘distant’ site of global disaster to the national politics of its audience. The act of witnessing is thus a call to responsibility, asking viewers to be political participants: informed about and engaged with Canada’s foreign policies. And herein lies the exhibit’s contribution to the discourses and practices of witnessing. The political self-reflexivity of Haiti : Holdup bears witness to the viewer’s culpability and connects images of global suffering to local political responsibility. What then can Canadians do for Haiti? In the words of Patrick Elie, a Haitian political activist and former member

of Aristide’s cabinet in exile: “Become citizens in your own countries.”6 Joseph Rosen Notes: 1

Like the earthquake in Haiti, these supposedly ‘natural’ disasters are inextricable from political and economic histories.

2 Boris Groys, “Art at War,” Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 127.

3 Again, ����������������������������������������� we’re brought back to recent headlines: U.S. military in charge of Haiti’s airport are accused of turning away planes with medical supplies for Médecins Sans Frontières in order to bring in more military troops. “Haiti earthquake: Medecins Sans Frontieres says its plane turned away from US-run airport,” Telegraph (London, UK), January 19, 2010, http://w w w.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7031203/ Haiti-earthquake-Medecins-Sans-Frontieres-saysits-plane-turned-away-from-US-run-airport.html 4 It cer tainly inspires the profit motive of U.S. mercenaries shifting their sites from Iraq to Haiti. See Jeremy Scahill, “US Mercenaries set sights on Haiti,” http://www.thenation.com/ doc/20100201/scahil 5 Haiti’s destabilization—which Ell links to Canada, the U.S., and France—can also be partially blamed for the fact that there was no infrastructure in place to buffer the catastrophic effects of the earthquake.

6 Darren Ell, “Haiti’s Catch-22: an inter view with Patrick Elie,” The Dominion 51 (February 27, 2008), http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1736

HAITI : HOLDUP

117 Documented Political Prisoners Video, 30:25 min. Media Gallery, Communication Studies, 2010.

Names and alleged crimes, in French, English and Creole, of 117 documented political prisoners jailed by the regime of Gérard Latortue following the 2004 coup d’état. Data compiled by the Bureau des avocats internationaux in Port-au-Prince and taken from their December 2006 document entitled, Partial list of members of the Fanmi Lavalas Party illegally arrested and still arbitrarily detained by the Government of Alexandre/Latortue.

BIOGRAPHIES

Darren Ell Darren Ell works primarily in portraiture and documentary reportage. His portraits of illegally detained terror suspects and refugees facing deportation, Between States, showed at Montreal’s Dazibao Gallery in 2006. The work was also a winner in the 2007 PDN Photography Annual, and won the 2008 Montreal Arts Council Touring Exhibition competition.

H A I T I : HOL D UP 24

His documentary coverage of the impact of the 2004 coup d’état in Haiti was published in a full online dossier with the National Film Board of Canada’s CitizenShift and with the Haiti Information Project, the winner of a 2008 Project Censored Award for exposing the controversial role of the UN in Haiti as one of the most important under-reported stories in the world. His stories on Haiti were picked up by independent news sites around the world, including Rabble.ca, Global Policy Forum, Pacific Free Press, Open Salon and many others.

His documentary work on the impact of the Israeli Occupation in the West Bank and Gaza during the Second Intifada was published by Electronic Intifada, and became an exhibition staged in Montreal and Winnipeg in 2004 and 2005.

He is currently working on two documentary projects: one explores the development of a social program in Haiti, the other examines the struggles and aspirations of adult immigrant students in Montreal.

His images have been published in Canada by CBC/Radio-Canada, The Toronto Star, The National Post, La Presse, Chatelaine, CitizenShift (National Film Board of Canada), La Dernière heure, Montreal Mirror, The Hour, The Dominion, Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch Magazine, Le Journal des Alternatives, Siafu Magazine, Tadamon! and Montreal Serai.

His work has been published internationally with Al Jazeera International, Electronic Intifada, Electronic Lebanon, MIFTAH (Jerusalem), Haiti Analysis and Haiti Action.

HAITI : HOLDUP

Dr. Lisa Lynch Lisa Lynch is Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Concordia University’s Department of Journalism. She works broadly at the intersection between culture, technology, and political change. She has served as co-director of the Guantanamobile Project, a multimedia documentary about the U.S. detention of prisoners at Guantanamo. Her writing on topics including Guantanamo, the representation of genetic science and post-cold war nuclear culture, and the circulation of classified documents has appeared in journals including American Literary History, New Literary History, and Journalism Practice. She is currently at work on two book projects; one on the representation of the post-cold war nuclear threat in film, museums and the visual arts, and another on the ever-increasing boundary skirmishes between traditional, institutional sites of facticity and newer, contingent sites of authority.

Dr. Jospeh Rosen Joseph Rosen is a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University’s Department of History & Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence. Rosen’s work investigates the cultural production and deployment of collective memory in relation to contemporary sites of suffering and oppression. His dissertation, Beyond Memory: From Historical Violence to Political Alterity in Contemporary Space, develops an ethical theory of working-through traumatic cultural memory and addresses mobilizations of Holocaust memory in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Current research seeks to develop curatorial strategies for creating public dialogues about the relations between historical violence and present injustices.

Rae Staseson Rae Staseson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal. She is a video artist and curator, and her work has exhibited internationally and is represented in numerous public collections. Staseson also collaborates with the Mobile Media Lab at Concordia University and she is embarking on a new series of video and sound works called Portable Places & Handheld Landscapes.

CREDITS

Theory In Practice (TIP) is a series published under the auspices of the Mobile Media Gallery (MontrĂŠal-Toronto). The goal of the series is to instigate dialogue between media creators whose practices may include writing, production, criticism or activism.

H A I T I : HOL D UP 26

Haiti : Holdup is the second catalogue in the series. It is produced in conjunction with the exhibition by Darren Ell, curated by Rae Staseson. Haiti : Holdup was shown at the Media Gallery, Communication Studies, Concordia University, from 29 February to 2 April 2010.

Proposals for a booklet or monograph may be forwarded to Kim Sawchuk, Communication Studies, Concordia University (kim.sawchuk@sympatico.ca).

For more information on this series and the exhibit visit: mobilemediagallery.org

CREDITS Curator + Editor: Rae Staseson Photography: Darren Ell Design + Layout: Katja Philipp Copy Editing: Tamara Shepherd Series Editor: Kim Sawchuk Publisher: Mobile Media Gallery/Communication Studies, MontrĂŠal Cover: Darren Ell, Port-au-Prince Feb 1 + 2, 2008

Acknowledgements

Rae Staseson would like to thank the many talented graduate students who assisted in the production of this work, including Katja Philipp, Antonia Hernandez, Tamara Shepherd, and David Paquette. I am grateful, in particular, to Katja Philipp for her outstanding work on the layout and design of this catalogue. This event would not have been possible without the assistance of the support staff at Communication Studies: Henry Lemmetti, Mike Smart, René Lalonde, Scott Prentice and Sheelah O’Neill.

Copyright 2011 Darren Ell + Media Gallery, Communication Studies CJ Building 1.419 Loyola Campus Concordia University 7141 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal, Québec ISBN 978-0-88947-501-4

In Partnership with

Media Gallery, Communication Studies, Concordia University