In a country dominated by gangs, photographer Rodrigo Abd’s images show both armed gangsters and the residents they terrorise
The two images are as stark as what they represent: the cause and effect of Haiti’s increasing woes. In one, a masked and armed gangster keeps lookout on a Port-au-Prince rooftop, just a few blocks from the presidential palace. In the other, a family recently displaced by gang violence takes shelter in a school that now houses dozens of families, a stone’s throw from their homes.
“Port-au-Prince is almost entirely controlled by gangs, and we wanted to show the efforts of people that are running businesses to survive,” says Rodrigo Abd, 45, an Argentinian staff photographer with the Associated Press who took the images. “But I was also trying to show another side to Haiti, to avoid the stereotypes that we always repeat, to show the violent without the violence, or the poor without the poverty.”
