Transcription of Nicole Wolf for the show Beyond Maine Borders: Haiti & Africa #255
Lisa Belisle: One of our good friends of the magazine is here with us today. This is Nicole Wolf, who is a Maine-based commercial photographer. After a long term trip to Haiti in 2010, she founded the organization Up from Under. Up from Under aided in building sustainable housing for four Haitian families as well as providing funding for micro-financed job opportunities and education. It’s great to see you here today.
Nicole Wolf: Good to see you, Lisa.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting because you’re always responsible for our visual and today you’re responsible for our audio. You’ve been photographing for the magazines for quite a few years now, I think.
Nicole Wolf: I think about seven years, actually. Before I moved up here, I was living in Washington, DC, and had a random trip to Maine on my way home to New Brunswick, Canada, and saw the magazines in a coffee shop and contacted Susan and Kevin. That’s how the relationship started. It was great.
Lisa Belisle: What are some of your favorite things to photograph for the magazines?
Nicole Wolf: I’m really enjoying shooting food and I’ve shot a lot of it since I’ve been here. The restaurant scene is pretty incredible but the chefs – you know, because I’m a portrait-based photographer. Having the relationships with the chefs that has cultivated into this whole, beautiful visual representation of what they do has been really awesome.
I really enjoy the food aspect and then also just the portrait aspect of what I do as well. I shoot a piece called “Culture” for Old Port Magazine and I get to meet some really incredible people and be creative about the approach. Those are my favorites, I would say.
Lisa Belisle: The relationship that you have with your subjects is really important when you’re doing portrait photography.
Nicole Wolf: Yeah, very important. We were speaking before we went on air about just making people feel comfortable in front of the camera. It’s something that I don’t necessarily think is a learned behavior, I think you just either have it or you don’t. I’m definitely a director when I’m taking portraits of people and I’m very communicative and try to make them feel as comfortable as possible and bring out something about their personality, both visually and through our conversation that allows them to just feel relaxed and it not to feel forced or contrived.
That aspect of it is really important. It’s something that I’ve really developed over the years and learned to- It’s one of the first things that I do a lot of times when I get a portrait assignment in any capacity is do a little bit of research of who the person is. I meet with them a lot of times so that I have an idea before going into it. Like a musician, for example, I always listen to their music, get an idea of what their sound is, what they’re trying to convey through that. A lot of times I pull ideas from lyrics and things like that to create something that’s not just, “Hey, guys, let’s stand on these train tracks and do the photo” (laughs).
It’s important to me. Just as much for me, I think, too, because I want them to be different each time and I want to be excited about every photo I take.
Lisa Belisle: There is something that’s really important about the storytelling aspect of the photography. To really get to know someone helps with that storytelling.
Nicole Wolf: Absolutely, absolutely. The scariest thing about being in front of a camera is that you’re being very vulnerable and you’re opening yourself up a lot of times to somebody that doesn’t know you. That’s a gift, when somebody gives that to you and they feel comfortable enough to reveal themselves to you in a way that feels authentic. It’s a really cool thing to watch unfold. It doesn’t happen every time.
The storytelling aspect of photography, it’s something that I’ve really worked on developing with my career. Portraiture is a little bit different. The photo essay work that I’ve done independently in my personal work is, I feel, very different than traditional journalism. Traditional journalism, you’re on the street in a situation documenting what’s unfolding in front of you. There’s not a lot of personal interaction that happens. That’s an important part of that medium with photo essay work and storytelling. It’s usually more engaged. You’re spending time getting to know someone. They can be more long-term projects as well. It creates, I think, a dynamic and a level of authenticity that sometimes doesn’t happen when you just show up and document something as its unfolding.
I prefer that type of photography, actually. I’m not a great journalist. I’m way too emotional and I prefer more the photo essay type perspective or opportunities that I get because I get to be more engaged with the people that I’m photographing.
Lisa Belisle: I have never thought about the difference between the photo essay and photo journalism and the difference in objectivity. It seems like you would have to be, if you’re out there on the street shooting something that’s happening unfolding in front of you, you just have to be the eyes.
Nicole Wolf: You’re just very present, yeah. It’s not to say that they don’t kind of intertwine. Some photographers may have a different way of looking at it, but I think a lot of times, with journalism, it is very in the moment. It’s quick. You don’t oftentimes know the subjects that you’re working with. As far as the media is concerned, it has to happen. We need that documentation. Like I said, the photo essay aspect of it can be more involved and more long term so that you get to know the people that you’re working with.
Lisa Belisle: How did you end up in Haiti?
Nicole Wolf: January 12th, 2010, was the earthquake that went through Port-au-Prince. Two months after that- Well, actually, it was within the first month, I had a friend from California that had an organization called New Reality International. It was medical relief team that was going in. They were sending relief workers in, emergency relief. She had contacted me to see if I would hop on one of the trips because they needed visuals of the mobile clinics that they were doing, the surgeries that they were performing, just basically for fundraising efforts. I said no in the beginning because as I said earlier, I’m a highly emotional person and so things affect me very- I cry at the Folgers coffee commercials on TV (laughs). I was worried I wouldn’t emotionally be able to handle what I was going to see and experience. I’d traveled a lot, but not in that capacity. Not to a developing country before and as on the ground as it would be.
I thought about it for about a month. Then they did a second trip and she approached me again. I just decided to get on a plane and was fearful of what I was going to see. It was one of those things that I knew at that point in my life that it was something that needed to be done. I wanted to help. I didn’t know what that meant and at that point, I was not educated on the different aspects of international aid and what that meant. I went in, kind of eyes wide open and jumped in this team. It was really intense. The debriefings at night were very difficult.
During the day, we were so involved with the communities of people. The visuals that I saw were really disturbing. The country was on the ground, the city was on the ground. You didn’t really have time to be emotional because we were just go, go, go, and there were so many people that needed help. My focus was, for New Reality, to document everything that I saw. It was more journalistic-based, if I want to use it in that way. I was just photographing everything that I saw, not super interactive, just allowing the medical team to do their jobs, and not being too involved that way.
That’s kind of how it happened first. Then things developed from there.
Lisa Belisle: When you say that you had some fear around doing that, I’m surprised because my experience of you is a kind of bold and fearless person. I remember when you came back to Maine and you were creating this new life for yourself and you really put yourself out there. As someone who also is affected in a very emotional way, especially by seeing patients, for example, there was a point in my life where I was like, “I don’t know if I can be a doctor because this is really intense stuff” and pushing through that. That’s not easy.
Nicole Wolf: It’s not. What I noticed really quickly was that I had a job to do. What I was going to say about the nights- What I noticed very quickly was that they did not need my pity. They needed my help. They needed all of our help. To be emotional and broken and crying all the time was not doing anyone any service at all. I just kind of channeled it and allowed myself to just be present in what I was photographing. We would have these debriefing sessions at night where you could kind of get it out and the things that you saw.
I felt connected, but it wasn’t until I went in- The first two times I went to Haiti, I was working with New Reality International. Then I started going in solo, which was one of those things, I am very fearless. In that regard, I will put myself in situations that a lot of people might not, but I just am full speed ahead, head up, eyes open. I just make it work. On the medical relief teams, we had a bunch of English interpreters that were Haitian. Three of them, they were three best friends, I became really close to. We would spend a lot of time together, clearly, at night, listening to their stories. That’s kind of how everything developed for me, was from Pepé, Sissan, and Sam and the relationship that I started building with them and hearing about their families and their homes that they had lost in the earthquake. Family members that they had lost.
It was at that point that I knew I needed to do something more or I could do something more. I didn’t know what that meant, but at the time, I was living in Washington, DC. My company was doing really, really, well. I had a very large network of important people and people that I knew would be able to assist in raising money. I didn’t know exactly how to approach it at first, but I knew that I wanted to help build homes for these three families that had lost their homes. I started a cause page on Facebook initially in October 2010. By January 2011, had raised 15 thousand dollars on Facebook. People responded in droves. I had spent that time period from my first trip in solo was June 2010 and I was journaling every morning and writing down how I felt. I would share those journal entries or parts of them and some of the photos that I had taken every time I was in. People were just starting to become very vested in these people.
Sorry, to back track. I started living with these three guys and their families periodically. Sissan lived in a tent city in a place Carday just outside of Port-au-Prince. The first time that I met Sissan’s family was when I knew that this building project needed to happen. He took me to the tent city, there were about 20 thousand people living in tents. I walked in and greeted with open arms. They were very excited to see me and to have me as guest in their home. I call it their home because that was the initial thing that kind of triggered this whole project for me. I walked in and Sissan’s mother was preparing food because a guest was coming and his sister as well. Inside the first tent flap was kind of their sitting room. There were some broken plastic chairs and a little table that had a rabbit ear television on it and some plastic flowers hanging from the ceiling.
In the back room, his sister, Beverly, was laying on the floor. This was the part of the tent that they slept in. There were nine people sleeping in this 8×12 space. She was super hot. It was like July, I think. She was studying. I could just remember seeing her laying on the floor and the sweat’s just dripping off of her, as she’s studying, into this book.
I looked around the room. There’s a mirror on the wall that had the girls’ earrings kind of stuck in the side of the tent around the mirror, stuffed animals on make-shift beds that were either slats with cardboard over them. The beds were all made and the pillows were all positioned and the stuffed animals. Clothing kind of organized in one corner. It was in that moment, it makes me emotional to think about it, because it was in that moment that I realized that… I’m sorry… That this wasn’t a temporary living situation for them. This was their home. Sorry, it brings back a lot of memories even though it was like six years ago. I stepped outside and I broke down. I wept. It really hit something hard in me.
Anyway, it was in that moment I had kind of a paradigm shift internally that I could do more. It was possible in this situation that I was living within in the United States that there were people that I knew would be participatory in helping to change the situation of this family. That, to fast forward, is why I started the cause page and how the first home was built.
It was really important for me at the time, as I learned things going through, that this home needed to be really sustainable. A lot of the temporary housing that was being constructed in Port-au-Prince was not something that would withstand another natural disaster. It was just to move people out of the tents and get them into- A lot of times it was just plywood structures with no air flow. They just weren’t going to be sustainable long term. There were a lot of great organizations that were doing really great housing projects as well. For me, I knew that I could build multiple houses for a lot less money or I could just concentrate on building really sustainable homes for about 15 thousand dollars, 15 to 20 thousand.
So that’s what I did. I knew nothing about building a house. It was also really important for me to make sure that the work was done in country so that the people that I knew were making money and that we were providing jobs through this process as well. One of my friends- Made a lot of friends in Port-au-Prince, but one organization called HCM, Haitian-based organization in Fonds-Parisien for about 35 years, and the owner’s son was an architect and he was a friend of mine, Kirby. I approached him about helping to design and facilitate these homes. It kind of started from there. That’s how Up from Under actually started.
After the Facebook cause page, I was like, “Okay, if I can raise 15 thousand on Facebook, what could I do if I really tapped into the community?” I talked to my girlfriend Laila that owned New Reality International, which was the organization that I first went in, and we umbrellaed Up from Under. Up from Under, kind of a literal term for coming up from under the earthquake, but not just that, but just kind of up from under whatever is holding you down. That’s how the name was coined. We umbrellaed it under her 501 c3.
I started reaching out to my community in DC and decided I wanted to do a benefit a year later in DC. I reached out to a lot of people and we organized this event that happened about ten months later with some chefs. I was really good friends with a chef named Brian Voltaggio, who is a Maryland-based restaurateur. The reason that we drew the crowd that we did for this event was because of him and his friends. I just had to give a shoutout because he is just a really great person. We did an art auction. We did a silent auction. We did a photography auction that I reached out to friends that are photographers around the country. They sent work for us to auction off. I also, in the process, through that year’s time, I was also doing relief work for other organizations like the Red Cross, USAID, Pan American Development Foundation, and met some different people through those organizations. I taught a photography class to some Haitian students and had an idea for them to photograph and we would auction off some of their photos at the event, too.
Very long story short, that next November, we threw the event in DC and raised another 65 thousand that night, which was really great. We had the first home almost completed. We had enough for the next two homes plus some micro-financed loans that we did for small business opportunities and put a couple kids in school.
Lisa Belisle: Do you still go back?
Nicole Wolf: I do, I do. Not in the same capacity. The thing that I learned – I learned a lot from being in this country – that it’s really difficult to really understand the magnitude as an international person of what it’s like to be there. It was really important to me when I was documenting for the two years that I documented and lived with these families. I lived with [Sisson’s 00:51:08] family in the tent city. I lived with my friend [Pepé’s 00:51:12] family in Port-au-Prince, in this broken home in Port-au-Prince.
My whole point as a photographer and a photo essayist was to live as authentically as possible within these families. I didn’t stay in hotels at night. I slept where they slept, I ate when they ate. I bathed where they bathed. I walked where they walked every time that I went down there. I knew that the only way that I would be able to develop a project that was really authentic to what I was seeing was to not go to a hotel and take a hot shower every night and eat a full meal and wake up refreshed because the Haitians have a lot pride and respect is a huge thing for them.
I learned to speak Creole fluently. That was a huge part of gaining respect with them because I could communicate with them in their own language and recognizing that this was not my home, it was theirs – meaning the country. That to implement my own ideas about things wasn’t necessarily the best way to approach this whole situation. I really developed a really great connection with a lot of people, not just with the families that I was working with, but within the communities. I spent a lot of time getting to know hundreds of people within those communities and developing this project.
I do go back. I spent about four-and-a-half years pretty consistently in country. The thing is that I’m never going- There’s always going to be a separation there. I learned very early on that- Well, actually it wasn’t that early on, it was a couple of years in, that unless I created sustainability for myself, it wasn’t going to be possible for me to create it for someone else or help to facilitate it for someone else. I needed to have my life here and figure out how to balance it with my life there. I do go back now. Some things transpired, and like I said, I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about what I needed to do to make sure that I was being taken care of as well.
It’s not an easy place. I’m trying to figure out how to consolidate into a very short amount of time. Charity work in other countries, a lot of times I think we as a community of people, we’re very compassionate and we have big, old mushy hearts that want to help anytime we see a commercial with kids on it. We want to write a check. A lot of times what happens on the ground, too, is large groups of people will go in with good intentions, but not realizing that a lot of times they’re stripping away dignity and they’re not allowing people to create sustainable opportunities for themselves because we just give, give, give, give, give because it makes us feel good.
For me, I think that I learned that very quickly that in order for me to best serve the people that I loved, was to not allow that to happen. Not easy to do, when someone’s hungry, you want to give them food. When someone doesn’t have shoes, you want to put them on their feet. In the long term, that’s not really helping to build a really strong, independent community of people. Sending shoes to a country doesn’t allow them to buy them from the local cobbler or whatnot. The food aid that goes in, the local agriculture is depleted because people aren’t buying from the farmers in the country. There are a lot of things that I learned I’ve been trying to implement now moving forward.
My very long, drawn-out way of saying why I don’t go there as much as I used to is because I’m not needed. There’s no reason for me to get on a plane and spend 15 hundred dollars if I’m just going in to have fun or hug a bunch of kids or whatnot. Where that 15 hundred dollars could be used in multiple other facets. When I go in now, it’s for a very specific purpose. It’s not just to go and fill a hole for myself because I miss them or I want to do something that is based in a selfish nature. I’m much more thoughtful than I was in the very beginning. That’s based on education, not necessarily that I wasn’t thinking in that way. It’s just I didn’t know. I think a lot of us don’t know.
Lisa Belisle: I appreciate your coming in and talking with me today. I think it’s great that you were able to build the four houses that you did and are shining a light on a situation which sounds very complicated and very emotional. I encourage people to go to your website to see some of the images that you put out there. When your book comes out, I will encourage people to read your book and also to see your beautiful photography that you do for us here at Maine Magazine, Old Port, Maine Home Design.
I’ve been speaking with Nicole Wolf, who is a Maine-based commercial photographer, who after a volunteer trip to Haiti in 2010 founded the organization Up from Under, which aided in building sustainable housing for four Haitian families as well as providing funding for micro-finance job opportunities and education. Thank you so much.
Nicole Wolf: Thanks for having me.