PARADISE LOST – How Vacation Photos Miss the Boat

When one is on vacation, as Sally and I are for a month here in Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, Mexico, one tends to appreciate sweeping new vistas. In our case, it's a tropical climate, with its exotic flora and fauna, cutting in on what was proving a long, grudging dance with a northern-North-America winter. And a whole people with faces, words and customs perhaps different from our own.

We want to paint it all with a broad brush, taking long shots of the sea, the beach...maybe the bar.  Look, Facebook friends, I am here!—we want them to see as much as possible in one or two photos. About as close to details we come is when we take pictures of the people we're sharing that experience with. And too many of those are taken quite spontaneously, with no regard for a background that might impart even the slightest notion of specifically where we are.

I've finally come to realize...why the question, "Want to see our vacation photos?" elicits more lame excuses than "Can you help us move?"

A SENSE OF PLACE
Believe me, I've taken a few of exactly that kind of photo. But I've finally come to realize—most often weeks later when I show them to someone else—why the question, "Want to see our vacation photos?" elicits more lame excuses than "Want to help me move?" The reason? Most of those images have no soul.

So in recent years, though I still shoot the occasional "look where I am and who's with me here" landscape and portrait, I've found myself drawn to more subjects I hope will capture a deeper sense of place and culture.

Here are some of those soul shots I've taken this month in and around Zihuatanejo. Images capturing very specific places—some of them no bigger than a square foot; the colors, shapes and patterns of a certain natural environment and a particular culture. And people—most often not posing, but captured at play or on the job, perhaps in a joyous or pensive or poignant moment.

If you're still with me to this point, I think you can tell that, every year, I leave more here in this lovely town than a chunk of dinero; I also leave a piece of my heart.

The Holy Week crowd of Mexican tourists begins on Playa La Ropa

Yeah! Maybe that older guy with the limp and the camera!

Up and away!

Primordial patterns

The breezy colors of la Calle Adelita

Sign-painting crew about to add sponsors' logos to firemen tribute

To every season...even if it's only two

Still life with fertility goddess and re-bar

Proud mamá and her beautiful little girl

Sí, I am zi one zat inspired Godzilla

She's kept an eye out for fashion trends along Juan Alvarez for nearly a decade.

Entrance to the Vega household

One of Zihuatanejo's excellent strolling minstrels - a dying breed

Yellow-crowned night heron

Who is this young man whose passport photo settled into this crude stairway?

Fish guts - one of Zihuatanejo's many stunning murals

Banded Peacock - Anartia fatima

CUBA – Art and Soul

Remember that scene from Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Malcolm, questions the bio-engineer’s reassurance that the dinosaurs couldn't possibly breed outside the park because they were all made females? And Dr. Malcolm warns that “life finds a way?”

In Cuba, an island nation isolated in so many ways from the rest of the world, that’s the way it is with art. Despite the stifling effects of a half-century embargo by the US, and a communist government not known for its support of free expression, Cuban art is finding a way.

Some Cubans are managing to rise above their hardscrabble existence and soar the clear-air currents of creativity.

During my first couple of days staying in Old Town Havana, it was hard to see beyond the surface—the work-a-day hustle and bustle of Habaneros, the widespread decay of buildings and infrastructure. I found all those forms, faces, colors and textures, if not uplifting, at least oddly photogenic. At first, that's all I saw.

But then, exploring side streets and poking my head into doors, I started seeing art and even meeting a few of the artists at work. Indeed, at least some Cubans are managing to rise above their hardscrabble existence and soar the clear-air currents of creativity.

MESSAGE OR MEDIUM
What does Cuban art have to say? I cannot begin to judge where creative expression stops and political statement begins, though I suspect nothing even close to the subversive ever finds its way to a public space in Cuba. Nonetheless, even if the works I discovered might fall a bit short of freeing the person, certainly, simply by capturing a place, a time, a feeling, they have the power to free the spirit.

To understand this, it helps to draw a parallel with Cuban music, a medium no one seems to fault when it eschews weighty issues like oppression and injustice. Cuban art—or should I say the art I was able to see in a narrow window of space and time—is, like the music, more about escapism than protest. It's not so much the lyrics that matter. It's the rhythm.

The media range from straw, to paint, to bronze; the canvases, from wet paper to building walls, to towering cliffs; the venues, from back alley, to back-room gallery, to stately hall.

Here are just a few images of that vibrant, irrepressible art.

"The Eye of the Hurricane," "I don't want cheese anymore." What does this say...and to whom?

 

Untitled sculpture by Roberto Fabelo in Havana's Plaza Vieja

Painter Lázaro at work in a back room in Viñales.

The "Prehistoric Mural" near Viñales turned out to be a very contemporary mural with a prehistoric theme.

At Havana's Experimental Graphics Studio, an exhibition of rhinos-only prints.

 

"La Conversación" by Étienne Pirot. Being in front of the trade center building, this would be translated, I was told, as "The Negotiation."

Private gallery in the back room of my friend Leandro's home.

Mural by Andrés Carrillo in Havana Vieja depicts 67 iconic figures in Cuban history.

In the lobby of the National Museum of Fine Arts

Artist at work in the Experimental Graphics Studio in Havana.

"Blue Flower" – one of four prints I bought at the Experimental Graphics Studio