Downstairs at the Photographers’ Gallery is the print shop, whose function is to put on displays of work by contemporary or modern photographers in quality prints which are for sale. The print room is currently hosting the first UK solo exhibition for Raúl Cañibano, one of Cuba’s most famous and prolific photographers.
Malecón series: Havana, 1994 by Raúl Cañibano. Courtesy of the Photographers’ Gallery
The room contains fifteen of Cañibano’s prints (more are available to view on request) and they’re all marvellous.
Cañibano is a people’s photographer, down and dirty among peasants and workers. There’s no studio work or models or posing. He works in black and white capturing the grit and feel of life for ordinary, generally pretty poor, Cubans.
Tierra Guajira series: Manatí, 1999 by Raúl Cañibano. Courtesy of the Photographers’ Gallery
So first of all I responded to them as gritty images of the labour and enjoyments of the Cuban working classes. Only slowly did certain patterns or approaches to emerge.
There are two obvious tricks or techniques he uses. The first is the use of multiple levels. In the photo above there are, pretty obviously four levels: the old guy’s face right up close to the lens, the guy on the right swinging an axe, the horse in the middle distance, and then the mountains on the horizon. You could say these multiple levels draw you into the image, but they also emphasis the photos’ artificiality: an odd combination of the naturalistic and the heavily contrived.
Secondly, there is Cañibano’s use of shadows. In the photo below the shadow of the woman washing her hair is reasonable enough. But the shadow of the horse and rider is unexpected, suggesting all sorts of interesting stuff going on outside the frame, and adding an air of mystery, of almost symbolic power, to the image.
Vinales, Cuba, 2013 by Raúl Cañibano. Courtesy of the Photographers’ Gallery
What Cañibano’s use of both shadows and the multiple levels or depths do is to disrupt the predictability of the images. To disconcert and decentre them.
By comparison, behind the sales desk in the Print Room are photos from previous exhibitions, including some by the great Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Bravo’s compositions tend to have a lovely flat, calm and classical feel. They are artfully composed.
The Daughter of the Dancers (1933) by Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Comparing the Bravo images with Cañibano’s brings out the dynamism not only of the Cuban’s subjects (all his people are generally doing things) but the dynamism of the compositions themselves, starting with the two elements mentioned above – the multiple levels and the shadows. His people are doing things, but the image is doing things as well.
Another favourite disruptive element in Cañibano’s photos is translucent fabrics. Sometimes kids are wrapping it round themselves for fun, or making a cape out of it. Or it is just there in the background or as a feature, maybe mosquito netting or fine muslin used as an awning, as in this photo which seems to be depicting age and youth, at least we think it’s a child silhouetted in the window. (Note the multiple levels: foreground, sheet, background silhouette and, very faintly in the distance, the horizon of trees.) The woman friend I went with said it reminded her of a pre-natal scan.
Raúl Cañibano, Tierra Guajira series: Manatí, 1999. Courtesy of the Photographers’ Gallery
Cañibano was born and raised in a poor family in the rural province of Las Tunas on the eastern side of Cuba. He had little formal education and worked as a welder until 1989, when a visit to an exhibition of Alfredo Sarabia’s surrealist photographs at the Fototeca de Cuba inspired him, at the age of thirty, to consider a career in photography.
It paid off. In 1999 he won the Grand Prix in the Cuban National Photography Exhibit for his project on the life of rural workers, Tierra Guajira.
Thus Cañibano had little or no formal training and picked it up as he went along. His first art photograph, depicting the shadow of an equestrian statue cut off in the middle to reveal an array of modern lamp-posts against a clear cloudless sky, established his style but also hints at his socio-political concerns.
After the collapse of communism in 1990 Cuba’s role as the pioneer of communism in Latin America lost its rationale. For generations the population had put up with travel restrictions and the shortage of consumer goods because they were told they were building a better society. Then communism collapsed. Now what? In Cañibano’s photograph the general riding his proud horse into the dream of a perfect future has been cut in half.
De su serie Ciudad (1992) © Raúl Cañibano. Courtesy of the Photographers’ Gallery
The print gallery assistant explained to me that, because of the restrictions on imports of photographic equipment into Cuba, Cañibano initially had to use expired film and materials, and didn’t have the correct printing resources to hand when starting out. So he tended to convert the negatives straight into digital images which could be stored and distributed.
And so, this year, the Photographers’ Gallery made the decision to fly Cañibano to England, bringing his precious negatives in a cigar box. Once here the negatives were turned into limited-edition silver gelatin prints in collaboration with master printer Robin Bell, who has worked with such big name photographers as David Bailey, Don McCullin and Terence Donovan. So this exhibition is a real first, creating high quality prints of Cañibano’s work, and making them available in the UK, for the first time.
All the prints are for sale, starting at £1,250 + VAT. I can’t afford anything like that but I can well imagine people who would pay that sum for a limited edition, high-quality print of one of these wonderful, vivid and evocative images.
Malecon Habanero, Cuba, 2006 by Raúl Cañibano. Courtesy of the Photographers’ Gallery
Related links
- Raúl Cañibano: Chronicles of an Island continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 17 November 2019
- Further reading about Raúl Cañibano
Books & Boots 