Joakim Eskildsen has released his latest series of photographs devoted to Cuba, a country which has enticed many great photographers, including Alex Webb, with its visual contrasts. It’s the unique blend of colonial heritage, signs of modern communism and the effects of encroaching capitalism that caught Eskildsen’s eye, all visible from the ever-more cosmopolitan and westernized Havana to the countryside. Eskildsen, who still shoots with film, left the north to visit the most remote regions of the south and west, including Santiago de Cuba, the cradle of the old revolution of the 1960s and the guardian of tradition.
The photographs are beautiful and iconic, shot in a colorful but slightly desaturated style and with Eksilden’s mastery of light. We see portraits of villagers, landscapes, scenes from everyday life, animals and objects. Like other Caribean islands, Cuba is a sea of green sheltered by a moody sky, fickle one moment, generous the next. Children play in the fields. A donkey and his owner take a break. Farmers go to work. To confront civilization, one must go to the city, where there are two-story houses and balconies with flowers hiding interiors that have lived through history and speak of it through old bricks, crumbling walls, wooden doors and windows, and extraordinary colors.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
