Galleries
Loading ()...
-
20 imagesFor me, the Quebec student strike of 2012 was a historic battle, pitting politically astute and organized Quebec youth against a state apparatus willing to use extraordinary measures of violence to crush their movement. The innumerable hours I spent in the streets documenting these events left me with my first taste of PTSD, great respect for the intelligence of Quebec's youth, and a deeper understanding of the functioning and potential impact of civil disobedience. I took thousands of photographs during the strike, often described as the most significant social movement in Quebec history. Throughout my shooting of this 6-month drama, I combined photojournalism with portraiture and interviews. Some of these photographs ended up in a major collaborative exhibition entitled "Carré rouge : droit de parole" that I developed with Montreal photographer Philippe Montbazet. It first showed at the Maison de la culture de Côte-des-neiges in Montreal in 2013, and then again at the Maison de la culture Marie-Uguay in 2014.
-
18 imagesIn January 2006, Haiti was preparing for elections but living under a regime installed shortly after US Special Forces removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in 2004. For the second time in 15 years, Haitians had seen their elected government overthrown and thousands of their country's most talented people murdered or driven into exile. In Port-au-Prince where the violence following the coup had been the worst, I encountered an impoverished, tired and angry population, exhausted after years of instability and violence. The country's infrastructure had been neglected and its poorest citizens abandoned. The most popular political party in the country, Lavalas, was boycotting the elections but had given its support to René Préval's Espwa Party. For security reasons, Préval made few public appearances, unlike his unpopular rivals from the wealthy business class who staged carefully managed rallies in the streets of Port-au-Prince. As preparations for the elections went ahead, killings continued in Haiti's largest slum, Cité Soleil, where repression during the coup was most intense. The security apparatus of the country was in disarray. The Haitian National Police had been involved in numerous political killings during the coup, and the commander of the UN forces, MINUSTAH, had just committed suicide. What's more, MINUSTAH had been involved in numerous killings and unlawful arrests of civilians. In 2007 and 2008, it was clear that the election of Préval had restored calm in Haiti. For the average Haitian, however, little else had changed: the country's economy was still dependent on foreign aid, unemployment hovered at 70%, 4% of children finished high school, families lived off a few dollars a day, food riots were erupting, foreign troops still patrolled the streets and investment in policing seemed to be the primary concern of the international community.
-
17 imagesTraveling Haiti's National Highway #1 from Port-au-Prince to Gonaïves, one encounters scenes of beauty too rarely seen in the contemporary photographic record of the country. However, below the surface of the idyllic imagery, a struggle for survival is being waged. The highway itself is part of the story. The equipment used to resurface the road was destroyed in the tumult leading to the 2004 coup d'état. As a result, there are stretches of road so rocky that tires split, axles crack and wheel bolts break, adding onerous expenses to transport services. Just outside of Gonaïves, the town of Lestere's main street is lined with mechanics all doing a brisk business. The road winds through the Artibonite Valley, the heartland of Haitian agriculture, where peasants work with rudimentary tools and technology. The idyllic surroundings contrast the daunting struggle that peasants lead against international trade policies that are driving them off their land and into the slums of Port-au-Prince. What's more, in early 2008, entire sections of the valley were still flooded from 2004's hurricane Jeanne. The rural region of Souvenance offers temporary respite from some of these struggles: dignified dwellings, a secure community, gentle healthy people, and an inspiring quality of life unknown in Haiti's urban centers. Arriving in Gonaïves in January 2008, when I first traveled this road, haunting scenes of devastation wrought by the 2004 hurricane Jeanne were still visible throughout the city. However, a much greater disaster was only months away: hurricanes Fay, Gustav and Hanna would leave much of Gonaïves underwater and drive 15% of the country's entire population out their homes.
-
20 imagesIt is unfortunate that the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince so dominates news about Haiti, for nestled in the hills of the northwest is Haiti's second city, Cap-Haïtien. It is a beautiful city, much smaller and more peaceful than Port-au-Prince, featuring French colonial architecture resembling that of pre-Katrina New Orleans. However, as in even the most idyllic of settings in Haiti, poverty is eating away at the city's infrastructure and depriving Haitians of a quality of life to which they have a right. In the city's colourful streets, one finds industrious hardworking people as well as the tragic symptoms of socioeconomic breakdown. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Shada, Cap-Haïtien's largest slum where 40,000 people - all doing their best to move forward with their lives - live in unacceptable dysfunctional and unsanitary conditions.
-
14 imagesThis exhibition, entitled "Between States," featured large-scale portraits, audio interviews with refugee claimants locked in battles with Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Stuck in limbo without legal status for years, some in jail, others in refuge in churches, many faced deportation to imminent torture or death, unable to defend themselves in court because they are denied access to the evidence against them. Detailed legal data documenting the history of their struggles was also featured in the expo thanks to organizations such as Solidarity Across Borders, No One is Illegal and others. The subjects in the exhibition represent a tiny fraction of the thousands across Canada who face similar struggles every day. The expo was a winner in New York’s Photo District News Photo Annual contest in 2007, was the subject of a major exhibition at Montreal's Dazibao gallery, and won the 2008 Montreal Arts Council Touring Exhibition competition. Dazibao director France Choinière said the following about the exhibition : "Darren Ell’s work does not judge, nor does it try to absolve. The only verdict it offers is that of the right to justice, to a trial, to be given clear legal status. His involvement, informed by close collaboration with social justice organizations such as Solidarity across Borders, Justice for Mohamed Harkat and Homes not Bombs, goes well beyond a mere connection to a subject. His close familiarity with his subjects, moreover, is surely at the root of the incredible power of his work. In these large-format portraits—it’s as if he were revealing, larger than life, the hidden face of a society which believes itself to be inclusive, fair and tolerant—there are no victims or heroes. Rather, Ell’s images place us face to face with ourselves. They question our own value system and perhaps our too-passive resistance. Accompanied by a sound track in which the individuals photographed describe their situation, Darren Ell’s work brings the documentary genre up to date." Montreal Voir art critic Nicolas Mavrikakis stated, "Darren Ell is a committed photographer. In his exhibition, he shows us the limits of our democracies. Here is an expo that reveals that there still exist politically committed artists who are interested more than in just the latest fashions or the decoration of bourgeois homes."
-
14 imagesThe exhibition, Haiti: Holdup, was created as a response to Canadian, French and U.S. policy in Haiti and comprises material drawn from my visits to Haiti between 2006 and 2008. The photo exhibition exposes the role of these three powers in the destabilization and subsequent overthrow of the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004. The photo exhibition looks at the consequences of the overthrow of the elected government, an event with which the Haitian people are living to this day. It questions the purported benevolence of the United Nations force that has been the predominant power in Haiti since 2004. The photographs and video installations of the exhibition place current foreign intervention in Haiti within colonial history. The large-scale blow-ups of the photographs taken in Port-au-Prince during UN police raids and popular demonstrations against rising prices harken back to French painters working at the height of French imperial power in Haiti in the late 1700's and to activist American painter Leon Golub. The first video installation features a serene but abandoned landscape with a voice-over by Haitian-Canadian Jean St-Vil reading Frantz Gabriel's eye-witness account of the abduction of Jean-Bertrand Aristide on February 29th, 2004. Gabriel was responsible for Aristide's security and was himself abducted. The second video installation is a looping projection, of legal data concerning the hundreds of political prisoners still detained in Haiti. The information for this piece was obtained from Haiti's Bureau des avocats internationaux (Office of International Lawyers).
-
7 imagesIn 2002 and 2003, during the second Palestinian uprising (Intifada) against the Israeli occupation of their land, I traveled throughout the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In the Gaza border camp of Rafah, Israeli bulldozers were levelling Palestinian homes and building an iron wall along the Egyptian border. Hundreds of Palestinians were left homeless and many were injured or killed in the fighting that ensued. I photographed abandoned homes and people as their homes were being demolished. People without homes and homes without people... This theme continued to develop in the West Bank where Israel was building a giant concrete wall around the entire Palestinian population. Homes were being demolished, land was being confiscated, olive trees were being cut down or uprooted and stolen. I worked with Defence for Children International (DCI), interviewing and photographing children and families whose homes had been blown up by Israeli forces as a form of reprisal for militant involvement as well as the homes of families whose homes were soon to disappear because of the encroachment of the wall. I chose Twice Removed as the title for this work as it refers not only to family and community, but also to the reality of Palestinian experience, of being removed once again from their homes and their land. I exhibited the work in Montreal and Winnipeg in diptychs and triptychs, connecting people to their land and their homes.
-
21 imagesÀ travers des portraits, des récits et des paysages, ce reportage documentaire explore la réalité des Néo-Québécois à Montréal. Il comprend trois éléments : portraits, extraits d’entrevues menés auprès des personnes photographiées et paysages urbains. En collaborant avec le photographe Philippe Montbazet de Montréal, nous avons choisi d’interviewer et de photographier des personnes de diverses origines, d’âges différents et de diverses professions qui ont comme point commun d’être des Néo-Québécois. Ils sont étudiants dans un centre de francisation dont le mandat est de les aider à s’intégrer dans leur société d’accueil. Le Centre Pauline-Julien est situé dans Côte-des-Neiges, quartier de Montréal où la diversité ethnique est la plus importante de la métropole. Après avoir établi un lien de confiance avec les élèves, nous avons mené et enregistré des discussions avec chaque personne, en les encourageant à s’exprimer librement sur les sujets qui leur tenaient le plus à coeur. L’objectif était d’explorer leur parcours et leurs réflexions afin de faire ressortir les éléments communs que les nouveaux arrivants partagent. Les portraits se faisaient après l’entrevue. À partir des enregistrements, nous avons rédigé les textes qui accompagnent les portraits. Ces témoignages ajoutent une dimension que le portrait seul ne peut communiquer : les raisons de leur émigration, les souvenirs qui les hantent, leurs déceptions, leurs peurs, leurs espoirs, leur désir de vivre une autre expérience, comment être ici et là-bas en même temps. Ces récits lèvent le voile sur l’anonymat et amènent une réflexion. Chaque portrait est fait sur un fond noir. Nous avons exclu tout contexte, détail ou connotation sociale qui pourraient détourner l'attention. Nous voulions nous concentrer uniquement sur le visage et le gestuel du sujet, pour lui donner le premier rôle dans un espace intimiste. Certains sujets s’arrêtent sur une émotion ou une pensée et fixent l’objectif alors que d’autres poursuivent leur réflexion pendant la prise de vue sans pour autant fixer l‘objectif. Le troisième élément de ce projet consiste en une série de paysages urbains qui situent les sujets dans leur nouveau milieu de vie, Montréal. Autant les textes renvoient à un autre espace-temps, autant les paysages situent les sujets dans le présent. Autant les portraits sont intimistes, autant les paysages situent les sujets dans des espaces publics. Cela peut être parfois ressenti comme une confrontation face à la réalité, une rupture entre le monde qu’ils ont quitté et leur nouveau port d’attache. Ce sont ces espaces qui unissent tous les sujets.
-
14 imagesIn 2015, one million people fleeing war and poverty, from Pakistan to Sub-Saharan Africa, migrated to Europe. The largest group of refugees came from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece, then moving overland through the Balkans and onto northern Europe. When I arrived In Greece in March 2016, the exodus story of 2015 had changed. Hungary, Slovenia, Serbia and Macedonia had closed their borders to migrants. The overland route was closed and thousands of refugees were stuck in Greece, the largest single group – 14,000 people - at the Macedonian border near Idomeni. Arrivals on rubber boats to Greek islands had slowed, but on March 20th, 2016, an agreement between the EU and Turkey took effect according to which refugees that arrived illegally in Europe risked deportation back to Turkey. Many boats landed on the Greek island of Lesbos that night, overloaded with terrified passengers hoping to beat the deadline. They had spent up to six hours on the cold black Aegean Sea, trying to slip past the Turkish coastguard who would take them back to Turkey. Two men died in the boats, others were suffering from severe hypothermia. In their documentation of the numbers of refugees arriving by boat to Europe, the volunteer organizations, crucial to the safety and well-being of the refugees, call the people on these boats “Arrivals.” As predicted, the deal struck between Turkey and the EU reduced the flow of migrants, but increased the level of risk they were prepared to incur to reach Europe. As a result, the number of dead at sea has since reached record levels.
-
15 imagesAfter filing a photo essay on the living conditions in the Idomeni refugee camp near the Macedonian border for the Montréal Métro newspaper, and aware that the mainstream media had been inundated with traditional documentary images of the migrant crisis in Europe, I began making photographs that were more contemplative and evocative, more personal and less generic. I left people out of these images to allow the viewer to ask questions, to imagine the plight of the refugees using the clues and traces appearing in the landscape. In Surviving Refuge, I use photographs of objects, spaces, as well as continuous and disconnected landscapes from northern Greece and the island of Lesbos to address some of the themes and contrasts I saw in the refugee crisis: the pain of loss, emptiness and absence from leaving behind one’s family and homeland; the abandonment and rejection, even violence, the refugees were facing in Europe; the disappointed dream of refuge and freedom which became a reality of survival and enclosure; and finally, the continued scattering of bodies from one land to another.
-
35 imagesDriven by fear of the proposed immigration policies of the new Trump administration and the stark racism his discourse has unleashed, a record number of migrants have been crossing illegally into Canada from the United States. Fearing rejection of their refugee claims at legal border crossings because of the 2004 Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement, refugees have been entering Canada illegally to make their asylum claims, primarily in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Quebec, in the dangerous cold of winter or under the cover of night. Although this migration is small compared to others around the world, the reasons behind it are the same: individuals and families risking the unknown in order to live in peace and security. Here are some of the scenes one is encountering almost daily along the Canada-US border in 2017.
-
73 imagesThe southwest border of the United States, akin to a continental socio-economic fault line, separates two worlds. To the south is Latin America, which for centuries has borne the brunt of harsh colonial interference. Foreign intervention and exploitation have deprived many Latin American countries of regular peaceful transitions of power, something virtually unknown north of the border in the US and Canada. Social, political and economic upheaval regularly drive migrants and asylum seekers to the US border in hope of a better life. Many never survive the quest, falling prey to organized crime or succumbing to the harsh elements of the borderlands. Since the 1990’s, the southwest border has become one of the most heavily barricaded borders in the world. NAFTA planners, knowing their 1994 trade agreement would ruin the livelihoods of millions of Mexican farmers, proposed a metal border wall to stem the flow of migrants northward. After 9/11, investment in border control grew exponentially. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) now form a security juggernaut in the US. The ever longer and higher border wall now works in tandem with a “virtual wall” of cutting-edge high-tech surveillance equipment positioned along the 3,000-km border. The same phenomenon is occurring elsewhere: the number of border walls in the world has quadrupled since 1990. And then there is legislation. The Trump Administration, for example, has proposed or implemented a steady stream of shocking anti-immigrant policies, most contested in the courts and some eventually abandoned. While the Trump Administration’s policies are extreme, US immigration practices in previous decades have left 12 million undocumented immigrants living in fear of deportation from the US, without access to citizenship or the basic services and rights enjoyed by US citizens. Mexican border cities from Tijuana to Matamoros have been flooded with deportees, their lives turned upside down since being expelled from the country they called home. Over the years, a nation-wide network of activists, solidarity and legal organizations have fought back, helping migrants and calling for comprehensive immigration reform. Photographing policies is of course impossible, but their impact is very visible: landscapes lined with steel walls and surveillance towers, border police, refugee camps, water barrels in barren landscapes, graveyards and other signs can be found throughout the border region. In this project, the story told by the land is enriched by the testimonials of those caught up in the drama that plays out on the southwest border every day of the year.
-
28 imagesWhile most international borders are constructs of the human imagination and are invisible from space, their impact on earth is very real. For climate refugees, for those fleeing conflict or persecution, for economic refugees from failed states, borders are often a significant hurdle in the journey for survival or the search for a better life. They can even be the demarcation between life and death. Some borders seem to be dissolving : corporations are multinational, trade is global, communication technology is shrinking relative distances, more and more people share a common language and travel the globe, races and cultures are mixing. However, nation-states make their own rules and can generate opposition to these phenomena. Nationalist and ultranationalist movements, racism and even ethnic cleansing strive to counter globalization. Are these the death rattles of an antiquated system or the reassertion of a necessary and unalienable power structure? Having often been drawn by forces that we now consider criminal - colonialism in Africa and Asia or the genocide of native peoples of North America, for example - many borders seem hard to justify morally. What right did colonists have to take another people’s land? What right do they have to refuse entry to the land their ancestors took at gunpoint? How do we understand the tension between human rights and national sovereignty? Does a nation have rights, just as an individual does? Who has the right to refuse another person in need, a victim? What are the rights of non-citizens? What is the relationship between international law and the laws of sovereign nations? How do victims of human rights violations seek justice beyond their own borders? These questions will become more pressing in the current context of climate change, globalization, the sharp division between rich and poor, and a growing refugee crisis, problems that by definition transcend national borders. In her final reflections on documentary photography, Susan Sontag wrote: « What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. » Photographers Darren Ell and Roger LeMoyne have spent many years on the front lines of the struggle between individual rights, the individual’s will to survive and the powers of nation-states. Each photographer has a distinct approach to their subject matter but the concerns that fuel their work bind the two separate visions into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. By combining their various bodies of work, the photographers raise important questions and illuminate some of the key issues that must be understood and debated as we navigate the current refugee crisis.
-
26 images
-
75 images
-
15 imagesOrganized popular protest dates back millennia and continues throughout the world today. Once cynically called “an excess of democracy” in the US, protest is one of many forms of popular engagement with the issues of the day. Animated by perceived injustice and a desire for change, effective protest operates on the visible level (crowds and signs), designed to attract cameras and educate the public. It also operates on a level where cameras rarely go: meetings, petitions, educational activities, organizing on social media and so on. Large scale popular protest inevitably draws a reaction from the authorities, and it is not always peaceful, as can be seen in some of these images. My passion for social justice and politics inevitably leads me to the street wherever I am. While some of these photographs have been taken in the US, Haiti and Greece, my home city of Montreal with its large diverse immigrant population is often the site of demonstrations of international solidarity.
-
40 imagesIn the last two decades, I have published and exhibited photographs about the impact of poverty and military occupation, the struggles of immigrants, refugees and political prisoners as well as the turmoil of social unrest. Doing this work as a white Canadian middle class man made me acutely aware of the differences between my life and the lives of those I photograph. While all human beings struggle and suffer privately regardless of class, what the camera sees in a refugee camp or a deeply impoverished neighborhood is different from what it sees in public middle class life. In order to create images of the latter, I began photographing public trade shows in Quebec where members of my social class avail themselves of the latest products and services coming onto the market. I then continued the work by looking at tourism during my vacations. Everything is Fine is a work of social documentary and a satire of the middle class. It uses tourism, leisure and consumerism as subject matter to explore questions of class, culture, race, inequality, gender stereotypes, distraction, and taste. It borrows from the language of vernacular photography with its focus on the banal and commonplace as well as from the language of commercial photography via the use of flash and saturated colors. The photographs were made between 2014 and 2023 in Canada, Croatia, Cuba, France, Iceland, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, and the United States.
-
66 imagesImages de l'équipe enseignante du centre Pauline-Julien, prises pendant la GGI de 2023, un évènement historique dans l'histoire de l'éducation au Québec.