Roberto
Salas: These are Cubans
by Damián Donéstevez (Radio Havana Cuba May 30, 2007)
Renowned
Cuban artist, Roberto Salas, one of the epic photographers of the Cuban
Revolution, is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his artistic
career. Coming soon is a new exhibition, where faces and common people
are the main characters. In an exclusive interview with Radio Havana
Cuba, Salas shed light on this and other aspects of his professional
life.
- I understand you are working on an exhibit dealing with human faces. What does this exhibition consist of? Do faces tell you anything? Do they appeal to you?
"The general idea of the exhibit is, first of all, that I have to do something for my fifty years as a professional worker, as a photographer. In August or September, I'll already have fifty years of work behind me. So, I had an idea for a long time to do an essay on Cuba. What I'm doing now for this job, which is going to be called 'These are Cubans", is to take pictures of people all over the country from one tip of the island to the other, trying to get, you can say, an ethnographic study or social study of the races that exist in Cuba, the different types of people, different types of professions. It has everything: policemen, workers, street people, street vendors... anything. It's a collection of about one hundred images, and I'm going to present that in October in the Cuban Photo Archives, during the main exhibit of the Week of Culture in Cuba in October. "
- Talking a little bit about your career as a photographer, you have a famous picture which you published in Life Magazine. Tell us about it. How did you come up with the idea of taking that photograph and publishing it in that outstanding magazine?
"As a matter of fact, that's a coincidence, because the fiftieth year that I tell you of professional photography I use that picture or that event to mark the starting point, although, I did photography before with my father, but in August of 1957 I did the image of the flag of the 26th of July Movement on the Statue of Liberty and in August, this year, is the fiftieth anniversary of that. In other words, both things coincide.
"At that time, it was done to try to provoke a publicity thing. A few of us got together, about six or seven people, somebody had the idea of putting the flag up there, we went, we placed the flag, I took pictures, and during the middle of the week, of the seven New York newspapers, four of them published that picture on the front page. The wire services -- United Press International and the Associated Press at that time -- sent the picture all over the United States, so it was published very widely, and, as you said, even Life Magazine published it. And that's the picture that I use as a starting point to explain fifty years of work."
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I like your experimental pictures or your manipulation of image, let's
say I love this series of yours, "Tobacco: Visions of a Legend." You
know, naked women wrapped in tobacco leaves. So what was your
inspiration for that exhibition and other series you've had in which you
experiment and use those kinds of elements?
"The tobacco series is part of a collection I did, it was ten years of work I did doing experimental photography of the human form, it was not only women, men were also included. The tobacco exhibition is one of them, but there was another series called Epigrams, the other one was called? I don't even remember the name now. That was a period of time that lasted about ten years until 2004 and I published a book, which is on the streets of Havana now. It's called Epigram and it has the whole collection of what I did at that time, including the one on tobacco.
"Why did I work on this? Because every time I had a new exhibition, I had to do something new, something different than what I had been doing before. As a matter of fact, backtracking to the original conversation of the exhibition that I'm working on right now, it's something that I have never done before. Every time I do something, I do something different, try to find a different topic, a different theme, a different way of doing it. "
- And how different is this from others?
"This one? I've never done anything like this before, never, because these are all pictures of people taken on one background with one light, and everybody is looking directly at the camera, it's just portraits of different people."
- So, they are sort of close-ups?
"Sometimes three quarters, almost the whole body, never the whole body, just almost the whole body. I've never done that before, and something like this has never been done in Cuba before either as far as I know, from what I've been experiencing, because it covers pictures of the whole country.
"Two-thirds of the work is already done, I'm now in the last stage, the last part, which is the most difficult, because now I have to look for the things that I think that are missing, the type of people, the type of faces. The beginning is very easy, because you are sure of everything, but now you have to go after exactly what is missing and now is when it's starting to get a little bit complicated. "
- What people are you missing?
"All over the place. I'm missing more common people, in other words, I have a lot of the professions, the professionals, different people working at different things, but now what I'm missing more is common, normal, straightforward people. In other words, those that you see in any corner, those that you see in any city, women, children, old people, young people, and that's what I'm after now. And every time I take one and see, I miss something else. It's a very ambitious project. It's not easy. It sounds very easy but when you say just one background and one light it sounds easy, but it isn't. It's difficult because the only thing that changes is the people in the picture, and that's what makes it more complicated but I'll do it. I have time anyway."
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Can you make a brief summary of your artistic career since your
beginnings? How did you start becoming interested in photography?
"When did I start? I don't know. My father was a photographer and since I was a young boy, all I knew in my house was photography. I quit school when I was fifteen and started to work professionally as a photographer. This picture I was talking about -- I was seventeen years old when I did it, the one at the Statute of Liberty. When I was eighteen, I was already here in Cuba and started working directly with Fidel Castro the first years of the Revolution and then been working at different newspapers and been a war correspondent in Vietnam in 1966, 1667, 1972 and 1973. I've had exhibitions almost all over the world; I've had approximately eighty or ninety personal exhibitions in about thirty-five or forty countries. So that's more or less what I've done until now, because I expect to continue working for some time yet."
- Is there any picture that has impressed you most? What's your best picture?
"I don't have really any one in particular; I can say one thing that I've said before. My father used to say it when he was asked 'what's your best picture.' His answer is more or less my attitude in the way that I think about this today, so my father used to answer: 'I think that my best is what I want to take tomorrow.' That's not a phrase, it's an attitude toward your work, it's a form of living, it's a form of continuing. In other words, it means that no matter what you've done, it doesn't make any difference. There is still more to be done. That's the way I take my profession. I make a living at it but it's what I like and I think that's more important."
- How would you describe your photography in terms of style, stylistic conception or technical conception?
"I would say I've done everything, I've done experimental, I've done documentary and I've done all forms of photography, publicity and commercial photography. Really, I don't think I have a style. I think that Picasso once said that he didn't have a style either. I'm not trying to compare myself with Picasso but what I'm saying is that Picasso said that he believed that a person who had a style was like a baker -- he had a mould, put everything into the mould and everything came out exactly the same way.
"I have everything; I've done everything, all types of photography, color, black and white. My preference is black and white, although I had a time in my life in which I had to work a lot in color."
- And why is black and white your favorite?
"Black and white makes you think more. Color has too much information, you have all the information, you don't analyze the tones, you don't figure out what color might be. The black and white picture has more of a question mark; you have to think a little bit more to try to figure it out, the color of things, the colors of the way life is. It doesn't have the amount of information that color has, and that's why you see pictures in color that you look at them and say: 'Well, there is nothing there, it's pretty, it's a pretty picture', but whatever you do has to provoke a person to think outside of the picture. They see what they see, but they have to imagine what's happening outside of that image. When you are able to do that, then you more or less have a pretty good image. If everyone that you want to say is inside the image and nothing else can be said, then it doesn't say anything. At least that's my point of view."
- Is there any exhibition coming soon abroad, in the United States, in Europe?
"I have a book coming out in London soon on recent years of Fidel. It should be out in June but there have been a couple of delays with the text, etc, but I expect maybe in June it will come out. But after that, I just want to finish this exhibition. When I finish this one, then we'll see what we can do."
- Are you pleased with what you've done so far?
"I'm never totally pleased. I think that one of the major things that any artist should have is that whatever he does, he should always think that he can do it better. So, no matter how good everybody could say an image is, etc, I would look at it and say: 'Well, if I had done this or that or that, it would have been better than this. As long as that exists, then I have no problems in life. The day I cannot do that, that's when I have to put my cameras away and retire."