Food market in Cap Haitian, Haiti

Oh, to be able to bring this scene to life with the noise, the heat, the humidity. The acrid smells of rotting crops and fly-covered meat, the sticky black floor. This photograph is strangely calm, its subject lit as if upon a stage by the Caribbean light penetrating the glorious, rusting, metal roof, surely once a beautiful structure but now as filthy and rotten as its vegetable-strewn floor.

After two days in a sterile, whitewashed hotel on a leafy hillside, I was eager to see what lay at the foot of the slope. Cap-Haitien is a pretty, colourful town, with “gingerbread” French-Caribbean architecture, palm-filled plazas and well-kept cathedrals and churches. But this was the flip side, the daily market, the source of sustenance and trade for many of Cap-Haitien’s residents.