“I always take a last shot. It might be my last shot. No last word, a last shot. That’s how I want to go.” Daniel Morel Haitian-American photographer

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Daniel Morel snapped photos from the operating room table until anesthesia knocked him out so surgeons could dig two tumours out of his brain.

The Haitian-American is one of those photographers: hard-core. He has covered coups, gang wars, lynchings, deadly hurricanes.

“I always take a last shot. It might be my last shot,” says Morel, 62. “No last word, a last shot. That’s how I want to go.”

The shot that might have been his last on Jan. 12, 2010, captured his friend’s gleeful face, as the earth below them bounced like a trampoline.

Morel reached for a swaying wall with one hand, and took photos with his other.

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It was the photographers’ hour on a hot January afternoon: 4:53 p.m., when the light turns from glare to gorgeous before it fades altogether.

Morel was in an artists’ atelier just off La Grand Rue, the city’s beleaguered downtown commercial strip. He was there shooting photos of the works of young artists.

The earthquake sounded like an approaching bulldozer. His friend’s face transformed from gleeful to frightened.

Morel’s next shots were in the alley leading to Grand Rue. A woman praying, arms raised into the air. Children on their knees, crying. An old lady shielding her head from falling concrete with two knotted, twig-like arms.

Then he reached Grand Rue, where the devastation was complete — buildings collapsed, a half-naked man lying in a pool of blood, the splayed, limp body of a woman, her lifeless head atop a bag of bread.

Morel kept snapping photos.

“The crowd was rushing one way, like the city was under a bomb attack,” he says. “I decided to go the other way . . . I knew it was my moment. There were no other photographers there. I wanted to do a good job for the next generation to see. I owned these pictures.”

It was the professional lucky break of the century — the biggest natural disaster of modern times. And Morel was in the heart of it, with his camera.

He shot for less than an hour, before night fell like a black blanket on the crippled city. Then he walked on shaky legs through broken streets to the Hotel Oloffson, expecting it to be destroyed. Instead, he found the century-old gingerbread mansion intact. Even more amazing: while snapped power lines had left most of the city in darkness, the Oloffson had power — a battery-charged inverter.

Morel not only had the scoop of the century. He had a way to deliver it to the world.

He quickly posted more than a dozen photos to Twitter.

To a 24-hour international news cycle desperate for details of the earthquake, those photos were gold. They were high-resolution, professional images from the epicentre of a disaster that killed up to 300,000 people. They triggered a media feeding frenzy.

Except, not for Morel.

Unbeknownst to him, a Dominican man named Lisandro Suero had stolen his photos and republished them on his own Twitter account.

That night, the world’s third-biggest news company, Agence France-Press, scooped eight of Morel’s photos from Suero’s Twitter account, distributing them to thousands of media outlets around the world. AFP’s North American distributor, Getty Images, is the world’s biggest digital photo news service. It offered Morel’s photos to its empire of customers, with the caption credit “Lisandro Suero/AFP/Getty Images.”

By the time Morel shuffled out of the Oloffson at sunrise the next morning, camera in hand, his photos had travelled around the world.

They were already the defining images of the earthquake.

They were being adopted by the International Red Cross and the American Refugee Committee to raise aid money.

They had three names on them, none Daniel Morel’s.

And he had no idea.

Stolen work

After AFP and Getty managers realized their error, they reissued the photos with Morel’s name. But they continued to distribute and license them without his permission — in the first case for two days, and in the second for two weeks.

According to court documents, they sold Morel’s photos 996 times — to prepaying subscribers and to one-off purchasers. The photos appeared on front pages of newspapers from Australia to Algeria, Israel to Indonesia.

Even after AFP and Getty Images issued kill notices, the photos appeared in National Geographic and on websites like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. You can still find them on an Iranian blog.

They were splattered in so many places on the Internet that one AFP employee charged with “scrubbing” them said that would be impossible.

The matter headed to court, but it was AFP suing Morel for commercial defamation.

AFP lawyers argued the company had done nothing wrong, as Twitter’s terms of service permitted it to license Morel’s photos, and therefore it had not infringed on Morel’s copyright. The company sued Morel because of the big fuss he was making.

Morel countersued, charging AFP, Getty and The Washington Post with copyright infringement.

While he waited, Morel returned to Haiti and, particularly, La Grand Rue. What, he wondered, had become of the people he had photographed?

Morel grew up on the street, in an apartment above a bakery owned by his father. Back then, the street was still grand, lined with porticoed buildings and trees along the boulevard. He and his friends would race from one rooftop to the next, two storeys in the air, flying homemade kites.

The last photos Morel took the night of the earthquake were of his childhood home. It was on fire.

The things he saw that night still haunt him. He gasps and groans as he looks through his photos from Jan. 12, 2010.

But he was drawn back. With the likes of CNN’s Anderson Cooper long gone, Morel wanted to continue to bear witness.

And he was painfully aware the impact his photos of the afflicted had on the world.

A simple Google Image search on one of his eight contested photos brings 482 hits — 482 separate web pages, many of them for charities working in Haiti.

“I was advertising for them to collect money,” Morel says bitterly.

His photos made for great ads — $6 billion was sent to Haiti in the first two years after the earthquake. According to the UN Special Envoy, more than 80 per cent of it went to international non-government organizations, particularly the International Red Cross.

And while his photos have brought him some belated fame and recognition (including a 2011 World Press Photo spot news prize), they haven’t helped their subjects much.

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Morel’s return to Grand Rue is also a form of atonement.

Back to the devastation

Four years after the earthquake, Grand Rue looks like an international travel warning. Few of the collapsed buildings have been rebuilt. The rubble has mostly been carried away, leaving abandoned lots and makeshift bars operating under grey USAID tarps. Those once-graceful walkways are blocked with sewage, garbage and vendors selling lunch and cigarettes from straw baskets and wobbly stands.

Morel cuts through the filth with purpose, carrying his camera over one shoulder and a bag with his laptop off the other.

He is going to show his subjects his photos, from that night, for the first time.

Stop No. 1 is what used to be Corridor St. Cloche — a narrow alley off Grand Rue. It is now a ragged courtyard, as most of its one-room concrete houses were destroyed by the earthquake. Down at the end is a small green house made of wood where Eunide Jean Vitale lives with her 14 grandchildren.

She is 63 now. She hasn’t found work since the earthquake ruined her small business selling cold pop on Grand Rue out of a cooler.

“I am hungry,” she says, clad in a yellow nightgown. “I was the one in the family making money.”

A neighbour pulls out a plastic chair for Vitale and a plastic coffee table for Morel’s laptop.

Her grandchildren and neighbours press in to see the screen. Ten people. Twenty. Then 30, all craning and crouching to glimpse themselves at their most wretched and vulnerable. It is so awkward, they giggle.

“Ti Mark. He still walks with a limp.”

“Oh, there’s Daphne. She died.”

“There’s Titid. She didn’t die, no.”

When Morel gets to the photo of Vitale, he stops. There she was, a ghost, sitting forlornly in the middle of the street. Her face, her hands and legs are coated in white dust. Her eyes are distant and weary. In the photo, her young grandson is screaming in fear behind her. He’s now a teenager. He tenderly puts a hand on her shoulder.

“Is that me?” says Vitale, looking up at Morel, who is snapping photos again.

She drops her face into her hands and cries.

“I was looking at death,” she says. “I didn’t see life.”

So far, Morel has found 18 people whom he photographed the night of the quake. The man he photographed rescuing people? He’s a cobbler who works on the sidewalk. The woman he captured being dug out of her room? She’s a prostitute who set up shop in another brothel so she could feed her child.

Only four of his subjects are doing what you would consider well, he says — a new job, a new baby, a new degree.

The rest, like the country, are struggling.

“They went back to the same old life,” Morel says, “the struggle to survive in Haiti.”

The payoff

If, amid so much misfortune, one can find luck, then Morel is triply blessed. First came the photographic opportunity of a lifetime, followed by the unlikely Internet connection from his hotel to the world. Having his photos stolen was, strangely, Morel’s third big break.

AFP and Getty gave Morel extraordinary exposure. Had he been hired by them that day, he would have earned $250 for his work, the company lawyers said in court.

But, because they took the images without permission, he will likely never have to work again.

In November, a jury awarded Morel $1.22 million in damages. He earlier settled out of court with The Washington Post.

Now, his photos not only define the modern world’s deadliest natural disaster. They help define copyright violation in an Internet age.

Both AFP and Getty have asked the judge to reject the jury’s findings and lower the damages. But Morel already has a shopping list in his head.

The cobbler will get a new storefront. The prostitute, she’ll get a house. Vitale’s grandchildren will get a trust fund for school.

All will get a deliberate, well-planned investment, he says. There is justice in that.

The payoff, if upheld, will buy Morel professional freedom. He intends to spend more time on Grand Rue, following the stories of the people he met the night of the earthquake.

He calls them his family.

“Grand Rue is something sacred to me now,” he says. “This story didn’t end for me on Jan. 12. This is a lifetime story.”