DEIRDRE MCQUILLAN - The Irish Times

PHOTOGRAPHY: THESE ALTERED IMAGES by award-winning Irish Times photographer Brenda Fitzsimons, who recently returned from a 10-day trip to Haiti, throw a different light on the aftermath of that country’s catastrophic earthquake. They form part of a fundraising exhibition by three women photographers as a fundraiser organised by Concern. It opens next Monday in the Gallery of Photography in Dublin’s Temple Bar.

A photographer whose assignments in the past year have taken her from the most dangerous country in the eastern hemisphere to what became the most dangerous in the western, Fitzsimons’s images of Afghanistan will be remembered for their almost Cartier Bresson quality of composition. In Haiti, she captured not just scenes of terrible destruction, but telling moments, caught in an instant, of extraordinary human dignity.

“We have been saturated with images of Haiti,” says Fitzsimons, “but I wanted to turn that news event into an art form and trick my audience into looking at pictures of Haiti again.” Her approach was to highlight aspects of her images in a surreal way without taking away from their fundamental truth and accuracy using the technique of solarisation pioneered by Lee Miller and later used by Man Ray. “I wanted to show what is now familiar devastation in a new, thought-provoking way.”

Some images are so shocking as to be unbearable – the skull on the roadway encircled with wire from torched car tyres used to burn the dead; the amputated foot of a woman writhing in agony; the bleak isolation of another giving birth in a makeshift tent; the tormented anxious face of a mother queuing before US soldiers for food vouchers.

Fitzsimons has captured the bizarre and the unsettling such as the extraordinary sight of a pink house unscathed in the rubble and tilted over as if ready to fall like a plaything; the front of a house shorn off to expose a child’s toy, or the shoes of the dead discarded in the rubble, the only way for survivors to identify their lost loved ones.

What made a huge impact was the Haitians’ unshakeable faith in the face of this disaster. “When you sing, God hears your prayers twice,” she was told. And the sound coming from 30,000 people nearby after one of the aftershocks is something she will never forget. “It was like the sound of a missed penalty kick at Croke Park followed by singing. You pretend it is not affecting you, but the one song that kept going through my mind was Peggy Lee singing Is That All There Is? and I kept fighting back the tears as I witnessed their staunch faith in the face of such tragedy. ‘It is God’s will,’ they said, ‘and we trust in God’s will’.”

The work of three women photographers: Brenda Fitzsimons of The Irish Times, Marie McCallan of Press 22 in Limerick, who visited Bangladesh, and Kim Haughton, a freelance who went to Ethiopia in January to visit Concern projects, will go on display at the Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square,Temple Bar, Dublin from next Monday until March 21st. Prints will be for sale, with proceeds to fund Concern’s projects in these countries