Portrait in black and white, but full of shades

Since Gustave Flaubert saidthat he and Emma Bovary,[i] his most celebrated character, were just one solid piece, the idea of artists’ biographies in their own works has spread out. So much that we accept the assertion as such, without even pausing to question what could simply be nothing but “one happy phrase.”

This issue, by and large one of the most complicated ones in art theory –narrator and reader, lyric subject and poet– prompted Cuba’s Felix Pita Rodriguez to jump to the following conclusion in the middle of laidback conversation: “Between the author and his work you find the same relation that exists between a bee and honey; they condition each other, but neither one replaces the other.”

I know that in support of Flaubert, I could say that his assertion should not be taken to the letter and that what he actually meant to say is that, at the end of the day, the author’s experience and the “laboratory of his life” are the raw materials and the environment for forging the work. It would be to no avail to object this. And Pita could have been asked as well: what if the honey produced by the bee is nothing but consciousness, both the object and the subject? Wouldn’t that bear out the idea of the inseparable fusion?

All this much comes to mind following the reading –appreciation, contemplation and enjoyment– of Jose A. Figueroa: A Cuban Self-Portrait, a peculiar book that comes up like a family scrapbook, an autobiography, an act of life, a compilation of relatively anthological images and a long whatever I’d like to add, but it’d be a brain-racking experience to try to spell that out.

Cristina Vives, a promoter, curator and art historian, has been in charge of the research and the proofreading of this book, assisted by no other than Mr. Figueroa himself, her husband of over thirty years. So, it’s not a farfetched idea to speak of a double-authored volume that exposes with brilliant objectivity “the works and the days” of a renowned photographer in the history of the visual arts on the island nation,[ii] part of the chronicle tradition and, in the same breath, a standard bearer –international or not, never mind– of elements of rupture good enough to turn him into a “rare” specimen from the very beginning of his artistic creation, back in the 1960s, as lab assistant at the mystic Korda Studios in Havana.

Thus, what seems to be a conflict of interests to a naked eye pans out to be a privileged observation position for the researcher since she’s been both an eyewitness and critic of the silent career of a man who took on photography not only as his livelihood –reporter and movie cameraman– or his form of artistic expression, but also as a whole. I mean, as something that must be fulfilled inexorably. More than just handpicking photography as his form of artistic expression, photography chose him. And with that view in mind, he has built a strongly autobiographical work, featuring clear-cut historic coincidences that never stop questioning its own expressive resources. So, before any of Figueroa’s most outstanding pieces (Havana, 1946) it’s really hard to forget the conscious eye behind the lens, the conceptual look that always rests upon the merely documentary character of the snapshots he captures. You hardly ever see a surprised image but rather a handpicked shot, like so many others that shine with implacable lucidity.[iii]

A few lines above, I labeled some of the images culled in this book as “relatively anthological.” Let me explain myself. The fact is that the authors didn’t only rely on the ingrained quality of the pieces, but also on their usefulness in terms of discursive capabilities, either to shed some light on Figueroa’s artistic prehistory or just to speak of a collection absolutely open to the future. It can be said, though, that this is not a photography book but rather an attempt to take a closer look at a particularly complex period of Cuba’s history –the revolutionary period– in an effort to single out the contingencies that whipped the artist’s personality into shape and how he reflects those contingencies under the light of his sensitive alertness. Beyond the photographed developments, the book conveys the feelings and sensations these events triggered in the photographer. Many of the images are simply priceless for the kind of message they render directly, and therefore time and again those shots amaze viewers for their ability to do away with preconceived ideas, either the war in Angola, a visit to the Sierra Maestra mountains, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the ill-fated 9/11 attacks in New York back in 2001.

Those who think Figueroa has been a lucky guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time should understand that over the past fifty years we Cubans have been living our daily lives as part of the history, so wherever the photographer happened to be –he’s proven that dramatically well– he found the markings, the unusual angle, the highly semiological metaphor that lays bare the last-second instant. For him there’s no such thing as something “photographically preconceived”, but rather the “photographically unknown” that vies to be captured in film.

When it comes to wars, there’s never a bombing scene but the foreground shadows of the men who expect for the inevitable to happen. No matter if that same foreground is dominated by just a rifle. When he visited the Sierra Maestra mountains, he didn’t care about the scenery. He zoomed in on a bunch of naked kids playing unworriedly with a horse on a desert beach. From New York City he didn’t bring the shots of the crumbled Twin Towers, but the signs of desolation. It could be appropriate to say that Figueroa is a photographer of mind frames who rebuffs the conventionally beautiful and does not try to forge a parallel reality by means of his art. He simply tries to go after daily life as part of a dynamic process that cannot stop being so, an inalienable piece of reality. He’s the interlocutor, the eyewitness and the manager of his own lifetime, the man who executes an ever-changing and easygoing esthetics that sways between minimalism and mere conceptual things.

The Book

In half a dozen chronologically-arranged chapters, the authors have compiled abundant material. Thus, “His whimsy legs are only good for Rock” collects Figueroa’s human and artistic genesis, the convulsive and rich 1960s viewed from the uncomfortable angle of a young man –a whole segment of the population– that even though he didn’t assimilate completely the sea changes that were going on, he didn’t accept either his own walk of life. El Vedado, father owner of a small store in El Cerro… The 1970s glitter in “July is worth a party”: at the end of the catastrophic 1970 sugarcane harvest, the residents of Havana try to win back their upbeat mood in the frenzied carnival celebrations that could last for days and nights… And then he gets to “Figueroa in Figueroa”, a project open to the future that intends to lay out parallelism between life seen out in a Havana street, coincidentally named like him, and its like-name avenue in Los Angeles. The artist could be on either side of the sea, yet he never ceases to recognize the human basics or stops revealing the intense function that moves behind the act of “looking”.^4[iv]

All of Figueroa’s work is organized in series which are nothing but impressions of his recurrent obsessions. They pop up spontaneously and one day the author, buried in negatives and contact sheets, “discovers” them. It’s an a posteriori arrangement that could either shape or not the upcoming work. None of them is definitely closed as they admit new visits, contributions and reviews. Among them I’d like to underscore “Exile”, “Marti”, “That Flag” and “Project Havana”. I strongly believe these abovementioned series comprise some of the images that better capture the nitty-gritty essence of that elusive and complex character called Cuban, the men and women who have lived through all these five decades: the breakdown of the family, the recurrent presence –for some obsessive moments– of Marti, that being that “shines down on us”, and our never-ending struggle to find the ultimate historic realization as a nation.

The photographer’s shots and Cristina Vives’ remarks (as-a-matter-of-factly excellent and enlightening) are wrapped up by an acute essay entitled “A Toast to Figueroa” penned by Danny Montes de Oca that stands for the most lucid thing ever written on the artist. Among other issues interestingly polemic, the reviews range from “the photographic as tragic condition” to “the photographic image as awareness of the reality”, a reference to the book’s study target.

In a word, it’s a passionate and Cuba-touched self-portrait of someone who never gets tired of photographing us, Jose. A. Figueroa, a staunch contributor to the island nation’s iconography. A book made for longstanding enjoyment, beautifully designed and, above all, very useful.

José A. Figueroa, un autorretrato cubano, Editorial Turner, Madrid, 2009.