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PSL photographer featured in Granma

'IMPRONTA DE LA HERMANDAD' EXHIBITION
The magical power of images

Jorge Valiente and Bill Hackwell follow the common threads of Cuban and U.S. people

BY MIREYA CASTAÑEDA —Granma International staff writer—

The camera is just one of the aspects that unite photographers Jorge Valiente (Cuba) and Bill Hackwell (United States). Their work has a lot in common, beyond differences of style. Their evident — and magnificent — intention is to show regular people at various moments of everyday life. It is not a glamorous look, but a realistic one. They are reporters, and yet... they have an artistic eye that proves – if that were still necessary – the symbiosis that is possible between the urgent and the beautiful.

Valiente and Hackwell are also joined by their search, with the magical power of their images, to break the silence imposed by the big-business media regarding how the Cuban and U.S. people live.

The exhibition in Havana at the – very appropriate! – gallery El reino de este mundo (“The Kingdom of This World” at the José Martí National Library), comprises100 photographs, and they achieve a balance and a compatibility that are not based on figures – 50 for Valiente, 50 for Bill. They have a very similar sense of composition. And, naturally, there is the theme of showing those people as one (calling to mind the movie Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford).

The Cuban has captured the lives of his people in the shadow of more than 45 years of blockade imposed by Washington, while the U.S. American has done so with struggles and a way of life very different from the image we are sold.

There are more coincidences between them. We discover that after asking our first question of both, in front of their photos. How did they begin? It turns out that the greatest impact on both their lives was war, which impels them, precisely, to fight with that powerful weapon, the camera.

JV: Before the Revolution, I had taken photos once with a little box camera. Later, I was a driver for the Revolución newspaper during the Bay of Pigs invasion, and when I found myself in the midst of those events – I was there on the 19th (of April, 1961) – there I was and I couldn’t take a photo, because I didn’t know how and I didn’t have a good camera to shoot it with, I made a serious decision to become a photographer, and began looking for books, advice, until I was granted a correspondence course from the Institute of Photography in New York, and was able to use the little English I had to learn something, and kept on studying until I became a photographer for Revolución and then for Granma.

It was the same for Bill. Vietnam happened to him.

BH: I was 18 years old when I went into the Army; we didn’t question anything. When I arrived in Vietnam as a war correspondent, my perspective of the world changed dramatically. That period had a large influence on my photography, because what happened to me happened to many others, and I think it’s happening now in Iraq. We soldiers understood, we knew in our hearts, that what we were doing was wrong, that it was an injustice. Many took drugs and had other problems. What I did was to take my camera and instead of photographing the war, I began to photograph the Vietnamese people. Like Valiente’s photos, understanding how people would look for food in the midst of that war, and I began to transform myself into a social photographer. To capture images, to capture what people feel.

The organization of the exhibition is equally intelligent. That dialogue of what those photographers see through their lenses every day. Valiente more given to portraits, seeking the psychology of the characters, reveals emotions. He uses black and white, given that chiaroscuro is fundamental to enriching the details of his images.

Hackwell explained that he began to organize an exhibition four years ago. 

B.H. I wanted to show in other countries that many people in the United States have mobilized in trying to change their destiny, because I think that the perception in other countries is that everything is all right for U.S. Americans: they have a car, a home; everything is marvelous and that is not the truth. For example, I include the photo of that homeless person to show that there are millions of homeless people in the United States, the richest country in the world. Right now there are 90,000 homeless people in Los Angeles. I want people to see that and to see that we are beginning to do things to change that, to put pressure on the system. That was my intention, but now I understand that there are many people in the United States who also need to see it, as a way of encouraging them, because right now the Bush administration has the lowest popular rating of any president; people are questioning it; it has lost the confidence of the people. All the lies that it is telling and that the media is putting out. For that reason I hope that this exhibition will offer another view of life in the United States and when they show it in my country that it will help people to say, "I too can do something."

I am surprised that Hackwell’s photos, in particular his recent ones, are also in black and white (the first taken in New York in 1979 and the last in 2006).

B.H. You’ve discovered a secret. In the last 10 years photographic techniques have changed dramatically. Almost all photographers today are using digital cameras. I tried to stay with film as long as I could, but in February 2005 I had to begin to move over to digital. I printed all these photos up until that date in my own darkroom at home and since then I have moved on to digital shots. You can see something different. I’m still not comfortable with the digital world, although I can take color photos and easily convert them into black and white, but I still have my own struggle with that and I miss film. There’s something different. There is something special in the darkroom and seeing the photo emerge on the paper. You take a photo and think how the negative will come out and it is more emotional. You anticipate what it will be like, but you haven’t seen it, it’s like giving birth. You see the image born. If there is a photo that I like it’s very emotional, my heart stops and I say to myself: ‘That’s what I wanted.’ With a digital camera there’s a distancing from the image, I don’t feel exactly the same.

Hackwell, a social photo-reporter, has been in the Cuba solidarity movement for many years and is a member of the Free the Five national committee in the United States. It is a detail of his rich biography that is impossible to avoid because a tour of his part of the exhibition begins with a letter from one of the five Cuban prisoners, Gerardo Hernández, and because Hackwell reveals to us an interesting aspect of the selection of his photos.

BH: There are 50 photos here. In fact I wanted to show 75. I brought 50 to have a balance with Valiente’s 50. As you know, Alicia (Jrapko) and I have visited Gerardo many times. It is part of our solidarity work, but along the way we have become friends. Gerardo and I have worked on many photographic projects. I send him photos, he uses them to respond to the hundreds of letters of solidarity that he receives every week and, in real terms, Gerardo has been a great international promoter of my photos. So solidarity is two-way. I respect his perspective of the world and before selecting the 50 out of the 75, I sent Gerardo the proofs so that he could see them, criticize them and help me to select them, and he made magnificent comments on the ones he thought would be good to show here. I always dedicate my exhibitions to the Five and in this one Gerardo was in the selection process.

The Impronta de la Hermandad exhibition is almost a survey. Valiente shows how the Cuban people live, suffer and enjoy themselves in spite of the blockade and Hackwell the social and anti-war struggles in the United States. As Gerardo notes in his letter from the Victorville Federal Penitentiary in California, it is “a war against the silence—of the large transnationals—unleashed—with the lens of the camera as a powerful weapon.”