Lives in Revolution is a free-lance art-documentary project that Ildi Tillmann has been working on in collaboration with a Haitian journalist, Junior St Vil, over the past two years.

“The images are meant as a celebration of human strength, effort and daily achievement in Haiti and are intended to counterweight the victim/hero/survivor framework so frequently used when talking about the country. The pictures in the portfolio are not in any way exhaustive in their description of life in Haiti- they cannot be.

To avoid sensation-seeking themes and to be as representative as possible, I deliberately focused on situations that showcase the mundane, the routine and the familiar for the people of Haiti, with the goal of representing daily life as lived, through the lens of the people featured in the pictures. My work was guided by the people I talked to and stayed with, summarised by Junior along the following lines:  

“When I look at images in the press, or in advertising for NGOs, I see isolated stills of our lives, all in marketing technicolor. It is what sells: disaster, tragedy, suffering and the foreign saviors who will help us become heroes one day. Except that the story of our heroism lies in our everyday struggles, in our strength of spirit and resilience, in our daily smiles, jokes, in empathy or love, in our reaction to acts of violence, pettiness and hate committed not only by foreign powers but also by our fellow countrymen. Our story lies in the heroism of being humans who have to face life according to the eventualities of their time and space. It lies in our art, and in our ability to not only see misery in places where photographers tend to focus on that aspect.”

Ildi Tillmann

For a full selection of images, please visit I am Not Your Victim: Faces and Places – Haiti.