HAV23 wants to blend environmental portrait photography with elements of cinematic visual narrative to explore Havana in a way that combines my own experiences, other’s representation of the city that’s inspired me, and the reality of the everyday.
While HAV23 has its roots in documentary, each image has been infused with a subtle cinematic element, capturing a moment or person in their normal daily life while inferring the feeling of a narrative.
Whenever I return to Havana, I’m continuously struck by how unparalleled this city is in cultivating inspiring individuals, each triggering the imagination. In the past, I’ve struggled when shooting in Havana. In some instances, the urge to follow inspiring elements was suppressed in order to just document and impose nothing. At other times, the pendulum swung drastically in the other direction, and I felt I was fabricating too much of a narrative that diminished the natural beauty within reality.
HAV23 simply allows the creative voice freedom to create the images while being respectfully restrained in service to the subject.
Two key elements are at play in this project: environmental portraiture (shooting the subject in their world) and the addition of a narrative element. Be it a way of framing a mise-en-scene in a film or following the gaze in someone’s eye that begs a question or opens a dialogue. It could be the colour of light that creates an atmosphere and activates the viewer’s imagination, filling in the narrative gap of who this person is or what they might be going through in this heightened moment.
In some cases, a narrative is implied by the juxtaposition of two individuals. At other times, the person is looking into the camera as if they were breaking the fourth wall, having ‘an aside’ with us, like they’re about to share something in confidence. Finally, there are those moments where the person is absent, but their space becomes the subject, brimming with traces of the life being led.
The thought came from taking what Italian Neo-Realism brought to cinema by using real people and minimal resources to tell a representative story that connects viscerally with the viewer.
Rather than focusing on one character’s arc, HAV23 explores a multitude from across Havana, painting a specific portrait of an individual within a single moment of their own unique narrative. And while the root of the idea may have come from cinema, it can only exist photographically. Leaving things in ambiguity is not typically cinema’s strong suit. Photography’s strength is just that – allowing things to remain unresolved and leaving the viewer with a greater appreciation and questions left unanswered.
Allow me to sound pretentious for a second and quote a French expression describing this evening scene before night falls: “Entre chien et loup” roughly translates to “when the dog becomes a wolf.” It’s that moment where a story can go in two completely different directions depending on the chemistry of night and alcohol.
