Images From Haiti: Photos By Music Biz Vet Jeff Antebi
As we prepare to live blog Hope for Haiti, the mega-telethon featuring performances by Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Jay-Z with U2 and dozen more stars, Rolling Stone hopes you pause to look through Jeff Antebi’s photographs from Haiti. The music industry vet explains how he went from shepherding Danger Mouse’s career to documenting current events after the jump.
• Images From Haiti: Photos By Music Biz Vet Jeff Antebi
“I founded Waxploitation with the goal of discovering and creating unique music projects. The last three artists I developed were Danger Mouse, Gnarls Barkley and Broken Bells. Last year though, I started to feel drawn to other passions and decided to take a sabbatical from the music industry. This led me to a sort of blend between art photography and war photography. I went to fairly dangerous places like Afghanistan, Haiti and Juarez with the goal of doing artistic photography in the midst of the chaos. Haiti was the first place I visited, and while poverty was horrific in places like Cite Soleil, but the people, especially the kids, had an unbelievable sense of humor.
Even though I was there for limited amounts of time, I took hundreds of photographs of people. When the earthquake struck and killed 200,000 people in almost an instant, I could recall those people as easily as I could my family. Now they feel like friends quite possibly dead or severely injured. But I don’t know their names or anything tangible about their identities I’ll never have the ability to know if they survived. My ‘Haiti’ folder feels like a cemetery.”