04/10/2024
LOS CUBANOS
"Truth is, Cuba looks best from afar. That’s when the frame fills with fifties cars, mile-long ci**rs and funky Buena Vista bars that keep mambos going for as long as the rum is flowing. But blow it up, pull in real tight, and blackheads and blemishes and rust and s**t splatter all over the lens and it’s easy to see that the fenders on that so-cool ’57 Bel Air are rusted right through the candy apple shine, the old lady chewing the fat cigar wouldn’t pose until some one waved a dollar at her, and Guantanamera, Korda’s angelic Che and other cheap measures of Cuban authenticity have infected street corners and park benches from Pinar del Rio to Baracoa.
The thing about Cuba is that it offers and offers, scene after scene, always willing to put on whatever costume you expect to see. It takes someone with a tight eye, and a big, open heart like
Figueredo to get up in Cuba’s face and see what is almost never
seen—the shame and the pride in equal measure, the relentless
joy of a people with so much not to be happy about. And perhaps
most amazingly, with his welcoming handshake and his trusted
Leica, he has managed to capture what may be most elusive for
a photographer - that which is not there. The voids of lives lived
out in the open. The empty spaces still occupied by what is miss-
ing. In many of his remarkable photographs, the men are
shirtless, the women are shameless, the rooms bare as a bodega’s bins at month’s end. In his photographs of absence, the emptiness fills the frame with insight and compassion, as if nothingness were somethingness, something integral and important."
Introduktion by NYT journalist and Pulitzer prize winner Anthony De Palma
