Seven Years from Cuba
A SHORT REFLEXION ON THE IMPERFECT.
I remember the broken roads, the wet gloom of an early morning; packed tourists rejoining reality, exiting the haze and stupor of the compound and its make-believe smiles. My head leaning against the damp glass of the bus window, my eyes searching for meaning, my body drifting along, past the fields and people and horses.
I’ve come back to these images many times over the years. I’ve processed and re-processed—colour, black and white, different toning. If you look at the metadata in the gallery view, you’ll notice the high ISO and (mostly) fixed aperture and shutter speed: 1/1000s, f/8 at ISO 6400. None of this was the right call.
A manual exposure was certainly necessary to prevent a shutter speed that would’ve been too slow to freeze the movement of the vehicle I was travelling on. But I should’ve lowered that ISO and used a wider aperture to compensate. I should’ve chosen a higher shutter speed as well. Truth is I was tired, thrown off by the lack of light; we were also headed for the airport and I didn’t really think any of these images would amount to much. So, empirically speaking, I made the wrong choices.
And yet…
The combination of pushing against the X100S’ noise ceiling, the complete lack of contrast, washed colour and slight motion blur gives the pictures a kind of unfocused, ethereal quality that somehow fits the subject and the surrounding environment. I don’t believe it’s justification on my part either… I think the images are what they were meant to be.
Perhaps I’ll print some of them one day.
This may very well be their true calling.
STANDOUT ANALYSIS
There are a few photographs from this series that speak to me—and many more from the trip itself. The image I chose as a banner for instance. But I’m particularly proud of this one, which, incidentally, works equally well in colour or monochrome.
I’ve written before about life as stagecraft, the illusion of a predetermined scene, of a movie director calling the actors to hit their marks on cue. I cannot overstate how much this fascinates me, especially when so much in a moment was impossible to control.
The composition works because every element is in its place and none of them competes against another. It works because of a random alignment of fate that made white predominant and yet distinct throughout the frame. Because of the man walking away, the woman bowing her head towards the woods, the other woman looking at the camera, defiant.
And it works because of the symbolism of the cross/church and mannerism of each of the individuals, ultimately isolated, waiting.
Even the horse appears to linger.
