Carlos Garaicoa: Photography as Intervention

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Documentary photography has a great tradition in Cuba. The images of the Cuban Revolution going through the bearded revolutionaries and the iconic Che Guevara up to the literacy campaign, the tumultuous nationalisations and demonstrations - they were all caught and diffused by great photographers from the sixties to the eighties. The parades carried on being covered, but they haven't moved anyone for a long time. In the nineties there was a palpable change from glory to uncertainty. In Carlos Garaicoa's early work there are images of these impoverished surroundings which is beginning to suffer the effects of the economic collapse, the phase known as the Special Period. His lens becomes a witness to the unease and above all to ruin. For over twenty years the starting point for Carlos Garaicoa's work has been this documentary character, immediately afterwards expanding into an invented addition. His works have often been called Utopian, and this is not totally off the mark. I see them as desired projections, as future possibilities for a present without any solutions, as challenges to our imagination and to our immobility. But if one does not capture the aggressiveness inherent to many of his projects, the sharpness of his irony or the impotent despair with which he turns to the spectator, means one is fooling oneself, not getting into what matters. All of these works show an interest for breaking the limits of traditional photography, reactivating the medium and opening up a long path of semiotic possibilities, but at the same time they maintain a deep respect for that image of departure, that document that is faithful to the state of things