After the earthquake of January 2010, non-governmental organizations arrived in Haiti in extraordinary numbers, bringing with them foreigners who took up every sort of job and project. Photography became one of the sector's working tools, a means for organizations large and small to raise money and draw attention to what they were doing.

Garland examines how that imagery operates. The essay treats the post-earthquake NGO world as a version of a tourism boom, built around the voluntourist who spends a stretch of time in the country, records the stay on a phone or a digital camera, and pushes the results out across social media. Those pictures, together with others made by foreign visitors, are then set against a much older habit of depicting Haiti and the Caribbean, and against the part tourism has played in Haitian history.