Cameron Davidson – Photographer

This evening I uploaded two new galleries to my portfolio site – Port au Prince Aerials and Rural Medical. The aerial images of destruction in Port Au Prince will be available through Corbis within the next few days.

National Cemetery

Cité Soleil

Tent City in the middle of Port au Prince

The Presidential Palace

Destroyed Homes in Port au Prince

Monday I dove into a environmental clash story and and spent the day in Central Virginia photographing one side of a complex issue. It was windy, cold and I was fighting to not show the snow in the photographs. Low angles worked along with overpowering the available light with strobe. It is a good story and I enjoyed the challenge of shooting a piece for a summer issue while winter is still on the horizon.

Less then thirty-six hours earlier, I was savoring the last remnants of Haitian heat and humidity as I waited for the flight home. American upgraded me to Business Class which was unexpected and a nice way to close out the week of photographing the poorest of the poor in southeastern mountains of Haiti. Last week I spent three days photographing a team of medical professionals from the Community Coalition for Haiti as they traveled to remote villages in the Sequin Plateau. The second day we set up a clinic in a small church with no windows and three small doors. The light was amazing and I shot what I feel is my strongest work to date in Haiti.

Here are a few of my favorites. Two new galleries will go up on my portfolio site tomorrow. These are the teasers.

Tomorrow I’ll show more aerials of Port Au Prince and the destruction of the city. A set of these images will go to Corbis and to aerialstock.com.

The good folks at Alien Skin software (the makers of the incredible Exposure 2 plug-in for photoshop) are donating ten-percent of their sales through the end of the month to the Red Cross and the Community Coalition for Haiti – the NGO that I shoot for and am a member of their board of directors. In addition to donating ten-percent of their sale, they are also offering twenty-percent off through the end of the month. Which is pretty cool!

Yesterday I photographed dedicated utility crews working to restore power in Northern Virginia. The Mid-Atlantic rarely is slammed with heavy snows and this is the second of the season – both twenty plus inches. Another storm is workings its way across the country and I expect we will see between eight to ten inches by Wednesday morning.

Canadian Forces members who helped CCH transport a mobile operating room from Santa Domingo to Cayes Jacmel. Also shown is Karen Carr, Director of CCH and Knox Singelton, Chairman of Inova Health Systems and CCH board member.

I wanted to update everyone about the Community Coalition for Haiti impact so far. What has helped us is our long standing commitment to Haiti. Core members of our group have been traveling to Haiti to perform and assist Haitian medical professionals since the late eighties.

TO DATE CCH HAS:
Treated over 8,000 patients in PAP, Pignon, Jacmel, Cay Jacmel, and Leogane.
Shipped in 22 tons of medical supplies including a 16 ton mobile Operating Unit donated to CCH by a Swiss consortium.
Shipped in 2 tons of food and water, 1 ton of tents and tarps, with more cargo planes flying in this week ($1 provide 1 lb. of food directly to areas where 50-75% of the structures were damaged and people are living in tents cities to survive)
Sent in 7 medical teams (49 doctors and nurses) to some of the most devastated areas of Haiti including Port-au-Prince, Jacmel, Cay Jacmel, Pignon, and Leogane.
Organized the collection and distribution of medical supplies for the Southwest Department of Haiti in cooperation with the Haitian Health Minister of the Southwest
Established ambulatory care system fro patient transfer and treatment in the Jacmel region
Providing ongoing triage and primary care at Hospital Saint Michel in Jacmel

There is a good chance that I will return to Haiti in late February for a week. This will be a good one. We will travel to remote villages where I’ll shoot stills and video of Haitian patients, villages and our team.

Patients waiting for treatment at Hospital Saint Michelle.

On the road to Lavalee in the mountains near Jacmel.

A glimpse of normalcy.

Stretchers everywhere. People just arrived as if almost by stealth mode. Some come in with a rush of emotions. Others, like this young man, found on the ground and no one saw the people who brought him to the hospital.

The entrance to our makeshift primary care unit was blocked by an abandoned ambulance. This elderly woman was carried by these two men to a emergency room physician who saw her right away.

This man carried his mother away from the hospital. I don’t know if he was taking her to another facility or why.

The Haitian Scouts were essential in helping keep order and to provide a sense of security to the people. They were a constant presence at the hospital and often helped carry patients into or from our ward.

This young woman suffered a significant injury to her right hip. Erin, a doctor from the Delaware group that worked alongside the CCH team, set the splint and arranged for her to be triaged to Cayes Jacmel hospital.

Hospital Saint Michelle in Jacmel. Three views of operating suites, destroyed buildings and children’s wards impacted by the January 12th earthquake.

The Sisters of Salesia have a small school and convent near Jacmel. They graciously allowed us to camp on their grounds and use one of their school rooms as a medical depot. Every morning as I made tea, the sisters would sing their prayers in French. Their voices lifted in harmony as they sang the Lords Prayer. It helped keep me centered and on track for the day ahead. On evening, the Sisters turned on the radio and started dancing with several children from Port Au Prince. I joined in and shot as they danced around me.

Every morning when we arrived at St. Michelle Hospital in Jacmel there was several lines of patients waiting for the doctors to attend to their needs. The CCH team worked alongside physicians and nurses from Delaware and Cuba. CCH hired a fixer to coordinate translators and drivers. Mel Schorin, an Emergency room physician from Boston, who joined our trip because his brother works for Inova, wrote a Creole-English medical glossary that he distributed to the nurses and physicians. You can download it here.

When we were traveling between the three hospitals, I would often shoot people with my 18mm and fill-flash as we barreled down the bumps and dips of the dirt roads that connect all of Haiti. This man is carrying a load of sugar cane stalks.

Downtown Jacmel. The San Francisco earthquake in 1989 was similar in scale and strength to the Haitian Earthquake in early January. Sixty-three people died in the San Francisco quake and over a hundred-thousand perished in southern Haiti. Why? Buildings in California are designed to withstand earthquakes and are built to strict codes. Haiti’s constant poverty means stretching your funds as far as possible. Their is very little oversight during construction and minimal building codes or inspectors to enforce them. Many of Haiti’s buildings pancaked because the concrete was stretched with too much sand. A concrete block in North America on average weighs eight times more than a standard Haitian building block. When the quake hit, the stressed concrete disintegrated.

Dr. Swati Agarwal, an Pediatric Critical Care physician for Inova Fairfax attending a young man who was beaten severely and left for dead on a Jacmel beach. He was carried into the courtyard and left on a stretcher. I found him and a young interpreter named Elvis summoned Larry Walker from Inova and another physician to carry him onto our makeshift tables, a collection of desks set-up in the courtyard underneath blue tarps to ward off the sun. The young man was severely dehydrated and suffered from multiple injuries.

Mass confusion reigns near the entrance to Hospital Saint Michelle in Jacmel. Bill Allard once said to find the place and wait for the moment. I sat on the steps of a church overlooking the entrance to the hospital and into a courtyard that swelled with doctors from CCH, plus Haitian-American nurses from New York City, a Cuban medical team and a group from Delaware. I shot a few frames and waited. I was looking for the moment when disorganization and chaos presented itself. Everyone was trying so hard: we were short on supplies, not enough time, hundreds of patients were lying in beds underneath makeshift tents and it all came together in a flurry that passed by in a few seconds.

The Washington Post embedded reporter Susie Kenzie with the first CCH team to enter Jacmel. They flew to Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic and drove from the DR to Pignon, Haiti and then flew into Jacmel. Her video was published on the Washington Post website.