Ernesto Bazan: The Cuba Tetralogy and Self-Publishing Photobooks
Recorded November 15, 2020
Rare Specimen Design will host a book presentation and conversation with photographer Ernesto Bazan by Zoom webinar. Topics will include making photobooks, self-publishing, image editing and sequencing, materials and production, and the choral editing process used during BazanPhotos Workshops.
25 de Noviembre, Ernesto Bazan’s fourth monograph about Cuba, is a powerful and poignant photographic portrait of the island and its people in the days, months and years following the death of Fidel Castro on November 25, 2016. This deeply personal book documents Bazan’s emotional return journey to his adopted, spiritual home following ten years of painful exile. On January 6, 2006, Bazan was forced out from the country when he refused to give up teaching his workshops. He left Cuba with his wife, Sissy, and their twin boys Pietro and Stefano, on July 4, 2016, ironically Independence Day in the US.
The book includes color photographs of found objects and collaged images that Bazan collected while walking the streets of Havana. Peppered throughout the book are handwritten personal comments and quotes from Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Cuban authors Virgilio Piñera, Heberto Padilla, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Leonardo Padura, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rose Kennedy, the widow of Bobby Kennedy. The quotes, which reference topics such as censorship, government control, complicity, fear, shame, regret, joy, and gratitude provide a running color commentary alongside the images that brings another dimension to the monograph.
RSVP required.
