Cuba in the Lens of Bernd Harnisch

By Amauris Betancourt. amauris@radioangulo.icrt.cu

(May. 06) The portrait made a very important contribution to popularizing photography, born in Europe during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Portraits were not precisely the first images made, but they had much to do with bringing this new technique closer to the people due to its high demand based on reflecting a real image and not a recreated one as in painting.

Making portraits is an art indeed. The first famous photographers devoted to it as such, but based on pictorial compositions to give it aesthetic, a category limited only to painting. This way the portraitist, and the corresponding gender, is the most prolific activity in the art history of the lens.

Then exhibiting portraits and revealing a new thing is quite difficult, but not impossible. Bernd Harnisch, a German photographer living in Holland, comes to Cuba, attracted by the 2009 May Pilgrimage, to show "People and Landscapes" in a photographic proposal going beyond candor.

Harnisch doesn't make things too complicated with deliberate compositions. He is devoted to taking pictures and does without conventions; however, he achieves an aesthetic recompense because he unveils Cuba with psychological and aesthetic tact from the view of a foreigner, not as a tourist that who comes just for pleasure, because Harnisch doesn't only make the picture, he writes rather a story and later hangs the picture. He first looks for the empathy of the photographic technique, and above all, readings in between, he comes closer to the topic.

He takes pictures of people and landscapes, and then backs his photos with brief, interesting stories, direct and allusive; and without maybe intending so, he gets close to Cuban idiosyncrasy. The reward comes in close-ups whose creativity relies on photographing beyond the physical image of a face.

The author of "People and Landscapes" rides on his bicycle all over the country, from Guantánamo to Havana, attentive to the daily thing that may go by unnoticed to a local photographer. He recreates this way a social history through that image of a "Hotel left in ruins," a reminiscence of Cuban colonial architecture, capitalist in service; or that "Stairway" kind of copy of opulence. Or the beautiful colonial village of "Gibara" in its ordinary social landscape. He doesn't leave out Cuban music seen in a "Rapper in Holguín," and jumps to sport in the "Maybe the best black Latin-American chess player," taken out of the streets of Santiago de Cuba, who he has not been able to defeat in a match.

Bernd Harnisch includes the "Curious neighbor, and "The "Family that welcomed me when there was no hotel for me to spend the night, or the "The helpful office worker who told him where to fix the tire of his bicycle", as well as the "Solicitous Salesperson" and the "Children."

Harnisch portraits in a singular way and maks justice to the Island he loves.