Cuba : this moment exactly so 9781683831440, 1683831446

Table of contents :
Cover
About This eBook
Title Page
Foreword by Pico Iyer
Introduction by Gerry Badger
Beginning of Images
Afterword by Lorne Resnick
Art Index
Acknowledgments
Biographies
Copyright
Credits/Purchase Prints & Hardcover Book

Citation preview

CUB A

photography by L O R N E R E S N I C K stories by B R I A N A N D R E A S

foreword by P I C O I Y E R

i n t ro d u c t i o n b y G E R R Y B A D G E R

ABOU T T H I S E B O O K

I

n his seminal book, The Pleasures of Good Photographs, noted art curator and critic Gerry Badger (who also wrote The Genius of Photography and, with Martin Parr, three volumes of The Photobook: A History) says the following about the photobook. The goal, of course, and the reason for the photographer’s attachment to the photobook, is meaning. The photobook, in short, is about narrative, making photographs tell a story, giving them relevant meaning. For in spite of their apparently clear and concrete relationship to the world, photographs are fragile and slippery carriers of meaning, at least beyond the level of “what you see is what you get.” A photograph is an abstracted trace of reality, in which time is abnormally suspended, making photography an inherently unreliable witness— precisely because it seems so finite and irrefutable compared to other forms of documentary imagery. A single photograph can express much, but in a narrative sense, it is like a single word. Without other “words,” there can be no sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The goal of the photobook then, is narration, but what kind of narrative are we talking about?

In theory, the possibilities are endless, but sticking a few photographs together in sequence does not instantly solve the problem of photography’s ineffability. Indeed, it seems to me that many of the best photobooks do not attempt to address this particular quality, but harness it and use it to advantage rather than fight against it. The kind of photobook that utilizes elliptical, or nonlinear narrative— the kind of photobook in which poetry and mystery are the order of the day rather than clarity and the concrete. As Ralph Prins has written: “A photobook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The photographs lose their own photographic character as ‘things in themselves’ and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book.” It was with the above in mind that carefully, over many months, I chose the two hundred sixty-six images in this book from my twenty-one years worth of photography in Cuba. Besides each image having to stand on its own to make the cut, I wanted all the images as a whole to create their own autonomous statement—the whole being greater than just the sum of the parts.

And lastly, I painstakingly sequenced the images—and included Brian Andreas’s stories on translucent pages—to give the book added emotional resonance with an eye toward creating that “dramatic event called a book” rather than just a collection of images. We have done our best to digitally replicate how the thirty-two translucent pages with the stories printed on them interact with images on the printed page in the actual physical book. Because the sequencing of the images and the story placement was so critical to the flow of the book, we have decided to create this book in a fixed format design. This means, as the name suggests, that the book format and all its elements are fixed. So, for example, you cannot change the font or increase its size within the book. For the best viewing experience, please view the book in horizontal format. Viewing horizontally will give you a single book spread (two images) per screen and a much better appreciation for the image flow and the stories when they appear.

Should you wish to enlarge any page, you can double tap on the screen. Additional enlargement (or reduction) can be accomplished by using two fingers to pinch zoom. Depending on your device, you can tap the lower part of the screen, and a thumbnail timeline will appear. If you hold your finger on this timeline, you will see larger thumbnails pop up—then you can slide your finger left or right to navigate through the book. Tapping in the page area will make the timeline disappear. And lastly, a single tap on any thumbnail (in the Art Index at the end of the book) will bring you to the full-sized image within the book itself. We hope you enjoy this version of Cuba —This Moment ★ Exactly So. Lorne Resnick

CUB A “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” —Anaïs Nin

CUB A photography by

LORNE RESNICK stories by BRIAN ANDREAS foreword by PICO IYER

introduction by GERRY BADGER

San Rafael, California

FORE W ORD

T

 he splash, the pulse, the rhythm, the sun: Every image you have of Cuba— so constantly described by people who haven’t visited in fifty years or have only seen the shimmering island in their imaginations—fails to catch the soulful, joyful, scarlet excitement of kids dancing along the waterfront or the bright, if sometimes wistful, gaze of an old man sitting on his stoop. I arrive in an airport terminal one typical sweltering day in 1987. No planes show any sign of taking off—nothing is moving forward on the official front—so the people around me in the broken building start tapping on tables, striking up a beat, and someone else pulls out a guitar and a couple of nearby passengers begin to pour their hearts into song and suddenly the whole static misery of being stranded in an empty room for who knows how long turns into a fiesta. Twenty-five years later, I’m heading out of one of the rambling, derelict, and gorgeous hotels along the seaside road known as the Malecón, and I think the day is too hot for walking. Up sputters a cheerful,

chatty blonde in a straw hat, at the wheel of a sixty-year-old Buick with the top down, hot-pink with ads for Bucanero beer along the sides, and we’re feeling the warm wind on our faces as we judder along the seafront to another crumbling, pineappleyellow building. Nothing quite makes sense in Cuba, and that is part of the beauty of it. You have to enter the place as you would a piece of music and set analysis and logic aside. The people lack soap, yet they’re rich, you can see, in life and spirit and a hard-won sense of resourcefulness. The buildings are falling apart, but they’re brilliant with color and a patchwork ingenuity of strings and pulleys. Your air conditioner is likely kaput, and there’s no pizza to be found at the gas station kiosk, but the children in their turquoise and cherry-red clothes leap through the air and perform a song-and-dance routine as if they are professionals, right there, where you’re standing. I’ve watched Cuba through more than a quarter-century of convulsions now, and I never get tired of it or begin to think it

can be tamed. Policies shift, leaders come and go, revolutions upend the place—and still it’s the sassy, maverick Caribbean island it always was, where the elegant sophistications of Europe take the limber magic of Africa by the hand and produce something you’ll find nowhere else (though Rio and New Orleans may dream of Cubano charisma). This is never to deny all the hard realities that remain, but reality, for decades (maybe centuries), has been what Cubans love to improve upon, to embroider upon, to turn into art or possibility. You enter a realm of the imagination when you step into the tropical darkness there—of improvisation and flourishes and high style—that turns daily life into something akin to the juryrigged Plymouths that still keep sputtering around, with more flair and color than ever. Jorge’s sailing for Miami tonight, you hear, and Mariel has Fidel’s ear—and if you want a lobster tonight, perhaps some champagne, head up that third nearly collapsed stairway on the left! A friend of mine, a longtime editor for Time magazine, just returned from Cuba, his first trip there since 1958, a year before the

Revolution came to power. Everything had changed, he said, and everything was the same. The spark in the eyes, the beat of life across the city, the rare buzz in the air that gives the island a vibrancy that becomes strangely contagious seemed to exist in a sphere separate from headlines and slogans on both sides of the water. The Cubans hold up the place, so it seems, through spirit and enterprise and flamboyance alone, even as everything else suggests that they and it ought to be sinking into the sea, and colors fade into sepia shades. As soon as I arrived in Cuba more than twenty-eight years ago, I realized it was the most beautiful, complex, intoxicating place I’d ever seen (so intoxicating that it could turn all my theories into mush and leave me not knowing what to make of it, other than to say that it was neither the socialist ideal some of my friends who’d never seen it said nor the totalitarian abstraction that others pronounced it from afar). It was a beautiful little girl with a f lash of mischief in her eyes. It was the impromptu parties of the kids on the rocks below the Malecón, a splash

of wetness leaving you wide awake. It was the old men in their chairs, rocking back and forth on peeling patios, saying it wasn’t so good now, it wasn’t so good before. In a lifetime of travel, I’ve never found a place that gets under one’s skin and into one’s bloodstream as Cuba does. The day I returned from my first trip, I went to my travel agent in California and bought a ticket to go back three months later. Then again, then again, then again and again. After so many trips in such a short time—and a novel written on the island—I decided I had to put it behind me if I was ever to see the rest of the world. But after eighteen years, I found myself pulled back again. The spirit of the place was not only undimmed, it was magically released, unpredictable as ever. Years zip by, and Cuba impenitently keeps shining with the youthful energy and freshness it’s always had, flashing a brightly colored leg through a half-opened door. Havana in its latest form has more stateof-the-art gadgets and rooftop swimming pools, a stunningly restored colonial

quarter, and new places of activity, made for nighttime whispers and conspiracies along the waterfront. But I never felt the island had changed in its soul; it was just singing in a different key now, throwing off fresh choruses, moving the fret on its guitars so that an unheard, unexpected melody could begin developing. Pico Iyer Key West, Florida February 2015

I N T ROD U C T I O N LORNE RESNI C K A N D CUB A ’S IN TO X ICA TIN G R H Y T H M S

T

he relationship of the United States with Cuba, one of her nearest neighbors in the Caribbean, has long been a close and sometimes thorny one. As well as the practical, economic, and political links, Cuba has a hold on the American imagination. Cuba was a place that was regarded as a tad dangerous and, therefore, infinitely alluring. How could you fail to be drawn to a society where, as popular mythology had it, women rolled the renowned Cuban cigars on their inner thighs. A cigar certainly became more than a smoke. Cuba also had a particular place in the American arts. For many years, the island was the home of Ernest Hemingway—America’s most famous if not her greatest writer. And it was a favored setting for the less exalted kind of story, the crime thriller featuring tough, handsome, but weary heroes and exotic, erotic, but designing heroines—the kind of cheap, beguiling romance that would make for a classic film noir. The island’s insidious Latin and Caribbean rhythms found their way into American music, particularly in the late 1950s and early ’60s, when Dizzy Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban jazz—“Cubop”—which, by diluting the bebop

element, made modern jazz more palatable to a wider audience. Then in the late 1990s, Wim Wenders’s film The Buena Vista Social Club opened up Cuban music to American audiences just when the country itself was cautiously opening up after decades of Communist entrenchment. American photography, too, did not resist the pull of Cuba. One of the most important early projects of the great Walker Evans was found in the evocative photographs made to illustrate Carleton Beals’s book, The Crime of Cuba (1933), a protest against the repressive dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. Evans’s photographs, though in a properly realist mode, are somewhat lacking in polemical tone compared to Beals’s text. But his wellknown image of a black dandy in a sharp white suit, standing purposefully on a Havana street, might be taken not simply as a key early picture by one of America’s greatest photographers but as a reference point for Lorne Resnick’s view of contemporary Cuba, in that he finds the dandy and the figure of swaggering style in contemporary Cuban life. When in 1959, a somewhat raggle-taggle army led by such figures as Fidel Castro

and a certain Che Guevara pulled off an unlikely coup against another dictator, Fulgencio Batista, the country entered a period of isolation from the U.S. Gradually, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, enforced strictures were relaxed as a cash-strapped Cuba was forced to encourage tourism in response to the USSR’s ending their massive subsidies to the island. The photographic view of Cuba generated by tourism tended to promote a clichéd picture of the island as a society suspended in a peculiar kind of picturesque aspic. It privileged a somewhat facile narrative that said—depending upon your point of view—either the righteous success of American sanctions or the corrupt failure of Communism had reduced Cuba to a “make and mend” society. The infinite capacity of photography to caress and heighten patina was lavished upon beloved but neglected colonial architecture with crumbling, flaking walls and grand but faded interiors, and lovingly restored ’50s American cars, carefully maintained long after their sell-

by date because of economic strictures. All this was naturally accompanied in the viewer’s head by the gently undulating sounds made by the Buena Vista Social Club musicians, who were apparently as old and as indestructible as the buildings and cars. Of course, this is certainly part of Cuba and the Cuban experience and has only become a cliché because a cliché is an exaggerated truth. This incomplete picture, however, is not for Lorne Resnick, who has been photographing Cuba for twenty years. He has largely resisted the lure of crumbling walls, but inevitably, they are there. The cars are a different matter—perhaps because they are closer to the hearts of the people than walls, no matter how seductive. For, like Walker Evans, it is with the people of Cuba that Lorne Resnick’s heart lies. This is immediately apparent in the first dozen or so images in the book, which, as in any photobook, set the tone. In this opening sequence, there are several pictures of young people, two in particular—of a runner and a diver—depicting youthful action and joie de vivre, a trope that appears again and again.

These are followed by two photographs of old people, one of a sidewalk sweeper signifying hard work, the other of two women sharing a pair of eggs, good neighborliness. It would seem that the photographer has deliberately left out the middle-aged. They do not figure nearly so much as those at the extremes of the seven ages of man. And one could speculate that this concentration upon old and young signifies an interest in the past and the future rather than the immediate present. He gives us the past, which is embodied in the old—and then in one bound moves toward the future in the shape of Cuba’s young people. The book has been many years in the making, but its title, Cuba: This Moment, Exactly So, is wonderfully serendipitous in representing this moment of transition— this momentous moment of transition— between past and future. It also represents photography’s singular moment, which, although apparently so exact, is not so much about the here and now as it is about freezing the past and anticipating the future. There are some beautiful and dignified portraits of Cuba’s senior citizens here, where life’s vicissitudes are etched upon faces and hands. One, incidentally, is of a cigar-maker— an elderly man—so the old thighs myth, however attractive, is neatly dispelled. And

these are matched, if not surpassed, by images of the young. Although photography is apparently so material, Lorne Resnick has concentrated on depicting the unquantifiable and the ineffable in his photographs. If Walker Evans was documenting the “crime” of Cuba, Lorne’s mission has been to encapsulate the spirit of Cuba. And to do so not with the simply documentary but with photographs of emotional and poetic resonance. The poetry of his imagery is amplified, or complemented, by the short stories of artist and writer Brian Andreas—stories that are almost Chekovian in their succinctness and, like the pictures, focus on people and the human experience. The sound of rumba and other Cuban rhythms, a unique blend of Spanish and African influences, permeates this book, in both visual and audial terms. And nowhere more so than in the section Lorne Resnick has devoted to the dance. Cuban music is not made so much for listening to as for dancing to—and dancing with natural style, joy, and self-expression. If the spirit of Cuba could be summed up in a word—two words actually— it is irrepressible joy—joy with a particularly flamboyant aspect. So an important sequence in the book is the dancing section, taken mainly at Havana’s

world-famous nightclub and cabaret, the Tropicana Club, but also during Carnival and the rooftop parties that Lorne throws when he visits Cuba. It is typical that he shot the same Tropicana dancer over a number of years. For him, this whole project is no quick journalistic assignment but a labor of love. Thus many of his subjects, both here and in other parts of the book, are friends, and this certainly pays off in the intimate quality of many of his portraits. Along with dancing, sport also plays an important part in Cuban life—it costs little to tone the body. And if you can’t afford a gym, you can work out by the sea or on a rooftop. In one of the few images of “those interiors,” there is a still portrait of an impressively honed dancer who could be a boxer, an island of self-confident calm amongst the hectic dance imagery. He reminds us that both dancing and sport contribute greatly to the Cuban sense of presenting a bella figura to the world. I have used the Italian term because there isn’t quite its equivalent in Spanish, although the concept itself is very much part of Cuban living, and Lorne Resnick has caught its essence many times, in both young and old. Walker Evans’s dandy lives on. Although he has made many fine landscapes and cityscapes in Cuba, Lorne Resnick’s portraits are where the book’s emotional

heart lies—something I shall reiterate once more. And although I have stressed the flamboyant and joyous nature of the Cuban spirit, echoed in Lorne’s flamboyant and emotional portraits, I would like to end with one of the book’s quieter sections, but one that is no less important for that. Indeed, for me it is one of the volume’s climaxes. Lorne has made a simple series of portraits of schoolchildren, very sober and serious (but not too serious) and beautifully judged. Their blue and red neckerchiefs would once have proclaimed them as members of the Communist party youth movement, but nowadays, like a lot of Communist institutions, that has atrophied naturally, and the scarves are just part of a regular school uniform. These kids, like kids anywhere, will inherit a very different Cuba from their grandparents. Lorne Resnick has captured a moment in history (twenty years is but a moment in the grand scheme of things) and brings this book out just when the moment is about to shift enormously. But one thing seems certain: Whatever the future, the essential spirit of the Cuban people will remain. Gerry Badger June 2015 Vienna, Austria

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AF T E RW OR D

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merica. It was love at first sight. I first visited Cuba in the summer of '95. It was, as most summers are when I have been in Cuba, searingly, intensely, wonderfully hot. My second day there, I met a girl named America. She took me to a club called the Palacio de la Salsa at the Hotel Riviera on the Malecón, where a fifteenpiece Cuban orchestra of world-class musicians was playing to a jam-packed crowd of the best dancers on the planet. I was mesmerized. I was hypnotized. I was awe-struck. The sweat, the heat, the sensually glorious dancing, the (very loud) music, the electricity in the air. I planned to stay for two weeks and stayed for two months. I fell in love with the country. With its music, its people, its cars, its buildings, its sun, its stunning light, its friendships, and that special heat that is so uniquely Cuban. Not only have I spent many peak moments of my life in Cuba over the last two decades, but in 2002, I asked my wife, Juliet, to marry me atop the lighthouse of Morro Castle in Havana. She said yes, we popped a bottle of champagne, and at that precise moment, the lighthouse keeper came out and told us we had to leave, as the lighthouse was closing. We shared our news and, with a (typically Cuban) joyous smile on his face, he said, “Congratulations! Listen, I have

to go. Why don’t you enjoy the sunset and just lock up the castle when you leave!” With that, he was off, leaving us alone atop the lighthouse in a four-hundred-twenty-five-year-old castle guarding the entrance to Havana. A surreal and sublime moment. I came to Cuba initially for its history and mystique. But I kept coming back again and again for the people—for an endless string of experiences like the one atop the lighthouse. Warm, openhearted people embracing you and inviting you into their lives and hearts. It’s a heady, intoxicating combination for anyone—especially a photographer. Annie Leibovitz once said: “A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.” And that’s the way it is for me in Cuba. Constantly falling in love—even if sometimes only for 1/60 of a second. Some of the images in the book are of places I only visited once and people I only saw once. However, many of the images are of places I visited again and again and people who were open enough to let me fall in love with them with my camera again and again over a period of many years.

Being a fine-art photographer, as opposed to a photojournalist, my goal in creating images in Cuba (and presenting them in this book) is not only to show what Cuba is like, but more importantly for me, what it feels like to be in Cuba. I want to create images that communicate the elation I feel every second when I’m in Cuba. It is a feeling like no other—moments filled with passion, love, joy, desire, grace, beauty, friendship, and laughter. To paraphrase photographer Henri CartierBresson: “If I go to a place, it’s to try and get that one picture about which people will say, ‘Ah, this is true. You felt it right.’” I want this book to communicate the feeling of what it is like to spend time in Cuba—seeing the same places day after day, running into the same people again and again. I want it to be like what Cuba is for me—profound, vibrant, trippy, electric—a place where just walking the streets, breathing the air, and connecting with the people feel like a contact high. Not only did I have this in mind when shooting the images and sequencing the photos in the book, but also when considering the book title. One of my favorite artists is Brian

Andreas, and it was within one of his beautiful, moving micro-stories that I eventually found my book title. That story not only sums up a lot of my experiences in Cuba (and other peak moments in my life), but also reflects my view on photography—the art of crystalizing one particular, irreplaceable, impactful moment. In fact, I liked Brian’s stories so much and found they resonated so deeply with how I felt about Cuba that I decided to put some of them in the book. In 2013, Brian traveled with me to Cuba and wrote new stories based on his experiences there and the images I had taken there over the last twenty years. Over those two decades, I spent more than two years total traveling through Cuba. This book’s two hundred sixty-six images (figuring an average shutter speed of 1/60 of a second) represent less than five seconds of frozen moments. Five seconds lovingly carved out with my heart and soul. Five precious seconds of life caught in the moment. Exactly so. Trying to preserve those beautiful peak moments in my life is much of what photography is about for me. I have found memory to be such a fleeting and fickle companion, and photography is a way of

crystallizing memories and emotions for myself and sharing them with others. This is what I did with one of my life’s first passions and the subject of my first book: rock ’n’ roll. There was a story behind every image in that book, and this book is similar. There’s hardly an image in this book that doesn’t bring back joyous memories of being in Cuba. But I’ll end by just mentioning two images: Plate 1 and Plate 250. The first plate image of the red car and the waves was the very first image I envisioned, even before I went to Cuba—although it took me five years and more than thirty trips up the lighthouse’s one hundred fortyfour steps to get exactly what I wanted—to get the light, the waves, the car to all line up with the vision I had. Instead of five years, Plate 250 took me five hours from idea conception to creation. It is a similar view to the previously mentioned image—a high viewpoint of the Malecón but shot from the opposite end. It was the last shot I took the last day of a trip in May 2015—exactly twenty years after

my first visit to Cuba (this second edition of the book contains an additional sixteen images I have shot since that May 2015 trip). It was fiercely hot. I remember feeling like I was burning up. Even the incessant wind felt super-heated, blowing into deep sapphire blue skies and cotton candy clouds. I had shot an enormous amount during the last several weeks, and I was exhausted and totally spent. I was ready to put my camera down and go home. Twenty-four hours later, sitting on the plane halfway to LA, I was aching to go back. As always, Cuba had left me feeling blissful, intoxicated, and on fire with life. What a lovely way to burn. Lorne Resnick Los Angeles, CA January 1, 2017

A RT I NDEX

 LATE 1 P Havana

P LATE 2 Havana

 LATE 3 P Havana

 LATE 4 P Havana

P LATE 5 Havana

 LATE 6 P Havana

 LATE 7 P Havana

 LATE 8 P Havana

 LATE 9 P Sisters Havana

 LATE 10 P Havana

 LATE 11 P Mailenis Havana

 LATE 12 P Maiyenis Havana

 LATE 13 P Havana

 LATE 14 P Havana

 LATE 15 P Havana

 LATE 16 P Havana

 LATE 17 P Havana

 LATE 18 P Havana

 LATE 19 P Havana

 LATE 20 P Trinidad

 LATE 21 P Havana

 LATE 22 P Pinar del Río

 LATE 23 P Havana

 LATE 24 P Havana

 LATE 25 P Vedado

 LATE 26 P Havana

P LATE 27 Havana

 LATE 28 P Havana

 LATE 29 P Santiago de Cuba

P LATE 30 Havana

 LATE 31 P Havana

P LATE 32 Havana

 LATE 33 P Alberto & Ana Havana

 LATE 34 P Yenifer Havana

P LATE 35 Irina Havana

 LATE 36 P Jennifer Havana

P LATE 37 Yohanis Marianao

 LATE 38 P Havana

 LATE 39 P Havana

P LATE 40 Carnival Santiago de Cuba

 LATE 41 P Havana

P LATE 42 Havana

 LATE 43 P Tropicana Havana

 LATE 44 P Tropicana Havana

P LATE 45 Tropicana Havana

 LATE 46 P Tropicana Havana

P LATE 47 Edglis Hayle Monier Tropicana Havana

 LATE 48 P Edglis Hayle Monier Tropicana Havana

 LATE 49 P Edglis Hayle Monier Tropicana Havana

P LATE 50 Edglis Hayle Monier Tropicana Havana

 LATE 51 P Tropicana Havana

P LATE 52 Edglis Hayle Monier Tropicana Havana

 LATE 53 P Edglis Hayle Monier Tropicana Havana

 LATE 54 P Tropicana Havana

P LATE 55 Tropicana Havana

 LATE 56 P Tropicana Havana

 LATE 57 P Partagás Cigar Factory Havana

 LATE 58 P Gregorio Fuentes Cojimar

 LATE 59 P Havana

 LATE 60 P Havana

 LATE 61 P Partagás Cigar Factory Havana

 LATE 62 P Partagás Cigar Factory Havana

 LATE 63 P Viñales

 LATE 64 P Havana

 LATE 65 P Havana

 LATE 66 P Havana

 LATE 67 P Gimnasio de Boxeo Rafael Trejo Havana

 LATE 68 P Havana

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Fo r m y w i f e J u l i e t : t h a n k y o u. A n d f o r Ja k e , A l e x a n d N i c k — m y t h r e e s o n s — w h o , a l o n g w i t h J u l i e t, a c c o m p l i s h t h e s e e m i n g ly i m p o s s i b l e : b r i n g m e m o r e j o y o n a d a i ly b a s i s t h a n b e i n g i n C u b a .

BIOG R A P HI E S L o r n e R e s n i c k  is an award-winning fineart and commercial photographer. His striking fine-art and commercial images have been exhibited in galleries and used commercially for annual reports, billboards, television, websites, and worldwide advertising campaigns. He currently has eleven fine-art posters published of his travel work and is a recipient of the prestigious Travel Photographer of the Year award plus numerous commercial photography awards. Lorne’s first book, Live in Concert: 10 Years of Rock ’n’ Roll, has become a sought-after chronicle of legendary rock performances from Aerosmith to ZZ Top. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

B r i a n A n d r e a s  is known worldwide for his lyrical and evocative short story writing and is the twotime Pulitzer Prize–nominated author of twelve books, including Traveling Light, Some Kind of Ride, and Something Like Magic. In 2013, Brian traveled with Lorne to Cuba and wrote new stories for this book based on his experiences there and the images that Lorne has created in Cuba over the last twenty years. He currently lives in the Driftless Region in northeastern Iowa.

P i c o I y e r  is the author of a dozen books on travel and culture, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Global Soul, and the novel Cuba and the Night. He is also a longtime contributor to Harper’s, Time, Condé Nast Traveler, and more than one hundred fifty other magazines across the globe. Though he has traveled from Ethiopia to Easter Island and North Korea to Tibet, he often feels that the destination that has excited him most is Cuba. He lives in rural Japan.

G e r r y B a d g e r  is a photographer, curator, and critic. He has written extensively for the photographic press and has curated a number of photographic exhibitions. Among his books are The Pleasures of Good Photographs (winning the ICP writer of the year award in 2011), Collecting Photography, The Genius of Photography, and with Martin Parr, three volumes of The Photobook: A History. He lives in London, England.

www.insighteditions.com Find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/InsightEditions Follow us on Twitter: @insighteditions Photographs copyright © 2015, 2017 Lorne Resnick Text copyright © 2015, 2017 Brian Andreas Foreword copyright © 2015,2017 Pico Iyer Introduction copyright © 2015, 2017 Gerry Badger Afterword copyright © 2015, 2017 Lorne Resnick All rights reserved. Published by Insight Editions, San Rafael, California, in 2015. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. ISBN: 978-1-60887-674-7 eISBN: 978-1-68383-144-0 Publisher: Raoul Goff

Acquisitions Manager: Steve Jones Art Director: Chrissy Kwasnik Designer: Leah Bloise Executive Editor: Vanessa Lopez Project Editor: Greg Solano Production Editor: Rachel Anderson Production Manager: Jane Chinn Photography Editors: Lorne Resnick, Juliet Funt and Elliott Lester

For limited-edition prints and books, visit: www.ThisCuba.com

Lorne Resnick has hit on something with his photographs. I’ve been going to Cuba for more than forty years, and more than most any photographer I’ve seen, Resnick gets you to see what turns people on about that surreal island. Lorne Resnick’s photographs show us what is most special about Cuba. In frame after frame you can see people’s openness, their wisdom, their humor, their inventiveness, and their love for one another. Their intimate way of being with one another is something Resnick captures as few photographers have—and you can see that he himself has become intimate with his subjects. He is not an objective observer photojournalist nor is he arranging the shot in order to make a work of art. Instead, his photographs show him to be—or to have become through his experience in Cuba—a participant in the life of his subjects and their surroundings. It is rare to see a photographer so completely connect with his subjects so quickly. Resnick’s images are a unique celebration of the best of Cuba—and, of course, the best of life. —Sandra Levinson Executive Director Center for Cuban Studies/Cuban Art Space New York City

CUB A LORNE RESNICK

BEING IN CUBA feels like falling in love with the person you know you were meant to be with. Day after day, and minute after minute, it’s exhilarating and bewitching. During more than fifty trips to the island over the past twenty-one years, award-winning photographer Lorne Resnick has sought to capture the experience of being in Cuba; the result is a collection of moments filled with passion, friendship, love, and laughter. Featuring two hundred sixty-six extraordinary color and black-and-white photos, Cuba: This Moment, Exactly So provides a stunning portrait of the vitality of Cuban culture, the beauty of the island, and the enduring spirit of the Cuban people. The book is organized around thirtytwo lyrical micro-stories by Pulitzer Prize–nominated author Brian Andreas, works inspired by Resnick’s Cuba photography and Andreas’ own visit to the island alongside the photographer. Featuring a foreword by celebrated author Pico Iyer and an introduction by acclaimed art critic Gerry Badger, this lavishly produced volume is an ode to Cuba composed of gorgeous visuals that will transport you into the heart and soul of the island.

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