This was the scene last time I was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 2008. Other than the overcast skies (forecast shows rain for the next 10 days!), I expect little to be the same when we return this Thursday. At the moment the Haitian National Palace is still in ruins and the surrounding Champs de Mars plaza is still a tent camp, more than two years after an earthquake leveled the nation’s already troubled capital. Add to that a cholera epidemic and who knows what to expect. What I do expect to find however is the same spirit in the people who live there, as they carry on in the face of seemingly insurmountable circumstances.

This time I’m heading down with Erinn and our friend Michael to tag along with GlobalDIRT (disaster immediate response team), a fledgling NGO, started by a young Marine, Adam Marlatt, during the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Following the tragic event, Adam and Robert Sullivan, also a Marine, hit the ground, converting a bread truck into an ambulance to help rescue some of the countless victims. Only two years later the organization is working on building the first 24/7 911 ambulance system in the country and is working with the local government and other NGO’s to help create a more efficient system that will better aid victims in Port-au-Prince and eventually across the country. We’ll be telling their story as well as discussing the shortcomings of emergency medical care in Haiti and the inefficiencies of some of the larger NGO’s.

Erinn and I are paying for this project largely out of pocket will be operating on a shoestring budget. We can therefore use all the support we can get in order to make a professional project that we hope will bring a large amount of attention to the organizations efforts and the ongoing problems in Haiti. Upon our return we’ll be aiming to publish the story in a number of magazines and news outlets. I will also be shooting video, which we hope will broaden the reach of our story. Of course, prints will be available for purchase when we return, but we are also taking pre-orders/donations at a slight discount in order to help us while we are down there. If you care to help out I have listed below the thank you perks I am offering in exchange for your support. Other than that, wish us luck!

Donations can be made via Paypal to my address, dz@davidzentz.com.

Perks:

• $10

  All donors will receive a thank you email and can take pride in knowing that they are furthering a longtime tradition of quality news reporting by serious and dedicated journalists. Donors names will be included on a “Thank You” plaque, which will be displayed during the photo exhibit in Los Angeles.

• $25

  You will receive the previous perk, plus a custom thank-you postcard featuring an image from a select series of photos from the project and others taken along the way that reflect the beauty and character of Haiti.

• $50

  You will receive the previous perks, plus set of four postcards for your personal use, featuring images selected from the project and others taken along the way that reflect the beauty and character of Haiti.

• $100

  You will get everything from the previous perks PLUS an 8×12 inch signed print of your choosing from a limited edition print series featuring images selected from the project and others taken along the way that reflect the beauty and character of Haiti.

• $250

  You will get everything from the first three perks, PLUS an 11×17 inch signed print of your choosing from a limited edition print series featuring images selected from the project and others taken along the way that reflect the beauty and character of Haiti.

Hernan and Satya fly a kite at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, Culver City, Calif.

A few weeks ago I got the Nikon D800 and immediately took it out for a spin. After visiting some friends in Culver City I decided to hike up to the top of the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, where I was lucky to find Hernan and his daughter Satya flying a kite high over the city’s distant skyline. Despite Satya’s apparent disinterest at this moment, she was actually untangling the kite string, which you can see quite clearly if you zoom in on the massive 36mp file this thing produces. Since then I’ve also had the chance to use the camera’s video features. No fooling around, my first use was helping my friends shoot a documentary film on up-and-coming Olympic swimming star, Missy Franklin. The film’s trailer can be seen here and is due out sometime in the next year. I’ll eventually cobble together some footage from that to share, but will hopefully have some more video opportunities in the meantime. So far I’m loving it! Anyone wanna buy a Nikon D3?

Santa Ynez Valley farmland

A few weeks ago we made another trip up to wine country, this time staying in Santa Maria. I have to admit I spent more time tasting wine than taking photos, but here’s a landscape I like taken some time between sips. There’s a lot of beautiful farmland in California as soon as you get out of the city!

Howard Kahn for Managed Healthcare Executive

Howard Kahn for Managed Healthcare Executive

Haven’t posted in a while! Time to get back on it. Here’s the first of several recent cover shoots I’ve done in the past couple months. In January I photographed Howard Kahn, CEO of L.A. Care Health Plan, in his Los Angeles office for the cover and an inside story in Managed Healthcare Executive. Kahn was great to work with and the view from the company’s new downtown office was pretty nice too! Check out the article.

Nana in Yellow 1

Red, White & Blue 1

Last week I had another amazing shoot with my friend Nana Agyapong, a Venice-based artist, model and actress. My first shoot with her was strictly portrait and confined to the studio, so this time we headed off in another direction. Nana has proven to be one of my favorite people to work with, because in addition to being stunning in front of the camera, she brings an amazing level of energy and creativity to the process. Shooting with her is truly a collaborative effort! In addition, she’s an amazing trooper, as it was quite chilly out there! Check out several more shots after the jump!

Nana in Yellow 2

Nana in Yellow 3

Nana in Red 1

Nana in Red 2

Red, White & Blue 2

Red, White & Blue 3

Nana in Blue

Christian Torres at home in Fontana, Calif.

A couple weeks ago I worked on a story for the Chronicle of Higher Education that brought national attention for the small Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. In late December, due to a complaint from an employee to the Board of Trustees that the school wasn’t properly vetting its employees’ immigration statuses, 17 workers who could not prove their citizenship were fired. One was Christian Torres, a 25-year-old kitchen worker who had been employed by the college for several years. Torres – who is pictured in the room he rents in a house occupied by two other families – and 15 fellow kitchen workers were among the 17 fired. The sudden termination of the employees resulted in immediate protests by both students and employees of the liberal college that prides itself on promoting Latino culture and continues to be a topic of debate. Meanwhile, those affected, like Christian, are moving on and trying to find new work, which he was hoping to land soon so he didn’t have to sell his car. Without getting into the debate of who’s wrong and who’s right, the situation is understandably a difficult one in areas such as this, which are primarily Latino.

You can read more about it in the Chronicle and in the New York Times. The Chronicle also posted a slideshow of images that include photos from the protests.

Love is in the air

Happy Valentine’s Day! I caught this scene while waiting in line for an amazing rattlesnake and rabbit sausage at Wurstküche in downtown Los Angeles two weeks ago. I thought I’d save it for a Valentine’s Day post. The hearts are a creative take on the ubiquitous, and most often ugly, bolts that have been applied as seismic retrofitting for many of the city’s older buildings.

Richard Jackson for The Chronicle of Higher Education

A few weeks ago I photographed Richard Jackson for the Chronicle of Higher Education. A professor at UCLA and former head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC, Dr. Jackson is the host of Designing Healthy Communities, a documentary miniseries airing on PBS this week and next. He is one of the leading advocates for better urban design, which in turn leads to better overall health for a community’s residents.

Jackson had the perfect place in mind for the shoot, a concrete island outside of baggage claim at LAX, where he says he often waits in a noxious cloud of cigarette smoke and car exhaust for up to an hour for a shuttle bus that will take him up to the UCLA campus. He spends his weekends in San Francisco, where his family currently resides. “This is my idea of hell,” he yelled over a cacophony of  car horns and revving engine noises pinging back and forth between pavement and low cement ceilings as we exited the baggage claim area. He had a point. The place doesn’t exactly scream ‘welcome to paradise.’

Photographing at LAX is fairly easy as long as you don’t pull out any lights and are out in the public area. Swarms of paparazzi and camera-toting tourists are a daily occurrence, so there’s a certain level of tolerance built in for casual shooting. So, I kept it simple, shooting only natural light and using the bounce from the adjacent parking deck to light the subject. We were able to shoot for several minutes without being hassled, which is more than you can say for many public spots in the city.

The following day I went to shoot him as he was giving a guest lecture to a class at the university. The material he presented is pretty interesting, and I found myself sticking around after I’d packed up my gear to listen to what he had to say. Many of us, particularly in LA, are already aware of what poor urban planning can do to impede pedestrians, but seeing it presented in photographs of labyrinthian neighborhoods and charts tracking our nations health decline with the rise of urban sprawl and suburbia was still fascinating and frustrating. It’s amazing to see how an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and asthma can in part be traced back to civic planners from the 1950′s. It also makes you realize the hurdles advocates of cities designed around pedestrians, such as Jackson, have to overcome.

This also made me appreciate living in Venice, which is an unusually walkable and bike friendly neighborhood. In fact, LA has numerous walkable neighborhoods. It’s just when you try to get from one to another that the nightmare begins. Speaking of which, it’s time to get away from this computer and go stretch my legs.

Dr. Lucy Jones for Smithsonian Magazine

I recently had the opportunity to photograph Lucy Jones for Smithsonian Magazine. We lucked out with our location, finding a spot at a private residence just north of the city that gave us a gorgeous view of the city, combined with a little touch of nature in the foreground, tying together her job as one of the nation’s preeminent seismologists with her role as a protector and voice of reason for the city’s earthquake apprehensive citizens. Jones, a science adviser for the USGS in Pasadena, has become somewhat of a local celebrity in Los Angeles for her regular tv news appearances where she explains the causes, risks and likelihood of tremblers before and after earthquakes have occurred. The story is an interesting read if you want to check it out. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Meet-Lucy-Jones-the-Earthquake-Lady.html#

Matt Ivester in West Hollywood, Calif.

Matt Ivester in West Hollywood, Calif.

On the last day of 2011 I met up with Matt Ivester for a portrait shoot for the Chronicle of Higher Education in West Hollywood, Calif. Ivester, the founder of the now defunct and controversial JuicyCampus website – on which college students could anonymously post rumors about one another – has just written a book, lol… OMG!: What Every Student Needs to Know About Online Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship and Cyberbullying during his summer off as a graduate business student at Stanford. I didn’t want to get too conceptual with this shoot, so avoiding doing anything that would try to illustrate the idea of ‘cyber reputation.’ I decided instead to just go with a straightforward portrait, playing a little with reflections to illustrate the about face he has made in his stance on the subject, but otherwise just trying to show him as is. As he’s from Palo Alto, we really didn’t have a suitable location to shoot, so decided to meet up at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood and wing it. He was easy to work with and we found a few good places to shoot, particularly across the street at the West Hollywood Library, despite not having permission to shoot there. I think it didn’t hurt that it was New Year’s Eve and staffs and security were at a minimum. The top image is what ran, but I like the headshot as well.