Daniel Morel has been taking photographs in his native Haiti for almost 25 years. He served as resident photographer for the Associated Press for 13 years, winning awards and appearing on front pages around the world. Morel also shot for many newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Toronto Star, Paris Match and others. He also served as the first Haitian bureau chief for the NY-based Haitian Times.

More recently, Morel has shooting for the New York Times and the Associated Press around New York state, as well as co-producing and -directing on documentaries like Unfinished Country for the US public television network (PBS) and a new feature about Septentrional, Haiti’s oldest big band.

Although Morel’s career has taken him all over the world, he has never forgotten his boyhood working in the bakery and playing on Grande Rue, hitching rides on the HASCO train, exploring the capital’s ravines and hillsides, and witnessing the brutality of the François Duvalier regime. When he was 13 he watched soldiers execute Jeune Haiti’s Louis Drouin and Marcel Numa.

“Ever since that day, I have wanted to be a photographer so that I could document history and denounce the things that need denouncing. People sometimes say my photos are ‘too negative,’ but in fact I am just showing people the way things are, because maybe if they see it with their own eyes, they’ll do something to change the situation. That’s why we called this show and booklet Facing our history. I hope they have an effect.”

Morel lives in New Paltz with his children, Seitu, 13, and Ayanna, 12, and with his partner, Jane Regan. He is working on a book drawn on his two decades of work in Haiti called Haiti Eyes.