Around the corner from Dominican Joe’s Coffee on South Congress lives a girl who you would all be honored to know.

When we sat down for coffee, which I consumed and my new friend declined, I knew she had just arrived back in town from several expeditions abroad and I asked her to remind me where she had been. “I was in Ethiopia, Iraq and Uganda.”

My jaw dropped to the table (barely missing my coffee). What?! This funky, dark-haired girl with beautiful eyes and a big, welcoming smile had been bravely traipsing around the world. So needless to say, I was automatically floored when I began talking with Esther Havens, humanitarian documentary photographer, and the rest of the interview was more of the same.

“Why was I so impressed?” you might ask. Well, the long and the short of it is that Esther, and photographers like her, use their aesthetic talent to impact lives around the globe. But Esther is different; she’s more than that.

Perhaps, it is her upbringing that has made her the unique person she is today. Her father, a musician, and her mother, a Holland native, produced 6 children and always encouraged them to be creative and innovative. They were surrounded by art, not only through classical piano lessons, but also by the art that adorned their family home, painted by Esther’s Great-Grandfather, a famous Dutch painter.

She has always loved photography. Giggling she told me, “I used to set up my brothers and sisters and take pictures of them with a 110 film camera. I would set up our cats with a background and take pictures of them when I was 10 years old. I just like pictures in general. I would even create portfolio books, albums, and say ‘Look at my pictures that I take.’”

So art and creativity came naturally to Esther. But when she was first exposed to 3rd world conditions in India at the age of 18 with an organization called YWAM (Youth With A Mission), she began to think of her natural talent and love for photography as more than just a hobby. Her group worked with various charities in the area doing humanitarian aid work for two months. She remembered, “It was my first time to experience 3rd world conditions, other than Mexico, and I really got to be in a culture that I loved and I remember capturing incredible moments of the people.”

Her time in India was a defining experience for Esther because she realized, “I wanted to become a photographer more than anything else at that point. I just felt it inside that this was what I was supposed to do.”

Upon returning to the States, Esther began to seek a way into the world of photography. She attended the Southwestern Photojournalism Conference in Ft. Worth where Esther encountered, “photographers from national geographic photographer, from Time magazine, from the New York Times; across the board they were all there. A few great photographers and editors there critiqued my portfolio and said, ‘You’ve got some work to do,’ and I said, ‘but that’s such a great picture!’ They tore it apart,” she told me with a smile.

Despite knowing that she wanted to be a photographer, Esther could not fathom how she could accomplish the goals she had for her photography and make it a career. “I knew I wanted to do aid work, but I also wanted to be a photographer and capture the lives of people. I wanted to work for a magazine, but I didn’t see how that could really change lives and I wanted to change lives. I thought I had to do either or, but I really wanted to combine the two.”

So to gain both photographic and humanitarian experience, Esther volunteered as a photographer for a few organizations. She went on trips to China, Peru and Tibet for various groups. At that point it was all volunteer work while she was building her portfolio. She explained, “That’s when I started to fall in love with it all. Getting to know people and capturing their lives, but still I felt that I was photographing for me. I wasn’t even taking pictures for the organization; I was asking myself, ‘what can I get out of this trip? What could I capture and take back that would impress people?’”

Esther felt like something was missing from her work up to that point and it took a little boy in Congo to reveal that missing link. “We were in this village and I snapped this shot of this little baby. A little African child with his belly out and flies on his face, definitely malnourished. And I remember thinking, ‘What a great shot. I got the shot of a lifetime.’”

With a shake of her head, Esther recalled, “And it was like a board hit my face because I realized that I was capturing images for me and it wasn’t for them. That picture in no way helped that child and it was from that point that I had this big turning point. I decided to only photograph for the people I met, for them and their cause and to help people make their lives better. So that’s how my whole turn to humanitarian work became the focus.”

And that’s just what she has done ever since. Her goal with each photo is to “find the human strength in the person. If you go into a war zone, you can cover the story from two different angles. You can do the story of survival and hope and joy, or you can do the story of destruction and poverty and the worst of the worst conditions. I tend to find that hope in people. I don’t want the image of the kid with flies on his face. The kid doesn’t always have flies on his face. I want the kid when his mother is picking him up and he is laughing and smiling. I think that connects with people here.”

Even her signature look has everything to do with the people and nothing to do with her. She calls this look her “light” series and she developed the technique while in Rwanda. Esther explained, “I just had this feeling that something incredible was going to happen on this trip, but I didn’t know what. It was there that I started seeing light and darkness. I kept hearing these words over and over again, ‘The light shines upon them.’ I really thought about those words. I think for so long I detached myself from the people photographed. I never let myself really feel what I saw. So I began a new series in this village that has continued for the past year. It’s a way of lighting the person so that it empowers them and makes us look up to them, no matter what their circumstance.”

Despite Esther’s success, with work appearing in Elle Magazine and Vanity Fair among many others, Esther uses her photography not for her own prestige, but to elevate others above herself and to share stories through image that the world would miss otherwise. She wants to be the middle person that sheds light on the incredible stories of these people, to tell the stories of those living in poverty in a way that makes them human so that anyone in the world can connect with them.

She confessed, “For me, I can’t understand poverty. Poverty hurts me so badly inside so my way of dealing with it is showing those people in a different light. The way that they should be. I just try to capture that part of them. I don’t want people to give money out of guilt. I want them to connect because they have compassion and then to give.”

With wise words she continued to reveal her heart and said, “That child didn’t choose to be born in trash dump. He didn’t choose to be born in a war zone. He didn’t choose to be born as a child soldier. That’s what I want to show. They are just like you and me. I feel like so many times photographs dehumanize people. They make us look down rather than look up. But I look at that woman who works 12 hours a day in a field and walks 6 hours a day with a 40 pound yellow Jerry can on her head for water so that she can survive with her family. I wake up everyday to air conditioning and crystal clear water running from my faucets. I have so much to learn from her. She might be covered in dirt and she might have absolutely nothing material, but she has so much joy and beauty.”

After I understood where Esther was coming from, I was dying to know about her most recent trips. Her work in Ethiopia was with A Glimmer of Hope from Austin. She told me, “I visited a village in northwestern Ethiopia that had nothing. Their water was contaminated and dirty, shared with animals and had squirmy leeches in it. If anyone got sick they would have to go to the nearest clinic in the city that was a 3 hour walk away. Many times you would see a sick person being carried down the roadside on a cot by four people. The nearby school is falling apart and dilapidated and the seats are all made of cow dung. The goal in the coming year is for donors to adopt different parts of the village and change the lives of these people in the near future. A water well can be dug in about a week and costs between 5-10,000 dollars. I am in awe of the work that A Glimmer of Hope is doing and the impact they are having in Ethiopia.”

In Iraq, she was working with a name that might be familiar to you, Heather Mercer. Heather was one of the two women aid workers who were arrested and held in prison by the Taliban in 2001. Mercer is building a Freedom Center in Northern Iraq complete with coffee bar, internet café, copy center, business center, movie theater, and sports programs. She is supporting and encouraging the Kurdish people living in Northern Iraq.

While on location, Esther learned that everything you see on TV about Iraq isn’t necessarily true. More than anything she was surprised to discover, “They love America, absolutely love it. There is a sign that says ‘I love Bush’ painted on a wall. They said, ‘Please don’t pull out the troops. The troops are the only thing keeping us alive.’” And she was shocked to find that they are living in total peace in the North, a different picture than most news reports of Iraq.

And her most recent trip to Uganda was with charity:water out of New York. The coolest thing about this charity, devoted to providing clean water to 3rd world countries, is that 100% of all public donations goes toward water projects on the ground. And they prove it with GPS coordinates and photos. Esther was essentially “proving their stories.” She reflected, “When I got there, this woman was getting water out of a pond with cows standing in it. That was her drinking water. One village I went to had a hole in the ground and they would scoop their water out of it. It smelled so bad that my hands would not stop smelling the entire day.”

Esther is always amazed at the instant change that a new water well brings to a village and in Uganda it was no different. “They were so happy, the whole village was singing and dancing. They even gave us a goat as a thank you and told us to take it to our friends in New York.”

Esther’s own compassion for people is obvious in the way she interacts with the people she meets and photographs. “The people I meet, they are not just people. They are friends. I get to know them, their names and their families. It’s not just a business to me. I wouldn’t do it. I want them to know that I am taking a picture so that more water wells can be drilled, hospitals build and schools reconstructed. I tell them that the reason I am doing this is so that their voice can be heard and their story can be shared with the world.”

In the future, Esther hopes to be doing just what she is doing now except that she hopes her ability to help change lives can reach even further.

Inspired yet??

Find Esther Online:
Estherhavens.com
Follow her on Twitter
TheRoscoeGroup.com

Charities:
charity:water
A Glimmer of Hope
global hope

Light

Self Portrait at Dominican Joe's