Raquel Perez (Havana 1954). A Havana-based freelance photographer and TV producer. She graduated at the University of Havana in 1981 and got the degree of Entomologist specialist at the “Pedro Kourí” Tropical Medicine Institute (IPK.) From 1994 thorugh 2004, she worked as producer for the Telemundo US TV broadcasting channel, in Havana. She also worked for the BBCMundo.com (UK) website and for several Spanish magazines. She was firstly awarded at the 10th Latin American Documentary Film and Photography held in Castilla Albacete, Spain, for the photographic series "The Queen of the Cemetery."
Artist's Statement
Cuba after Cuba images were given life after being divorced from journalistic texts which have accompanied them on printed pages or Internet. They are chronicles of the common activities and every day spaces. Unlike the Cuban official press, the photographer tried to represent her vision on the Cuban culture and reality with no makeup or rhetorical raised fists as signs of victory and power. Rachel's eye moves with surprising fluidity between spaces and events: a religious ceremony to Afro-Cuban idols, the morning inauguration of a school year, the relaxed presence of young people in the Malecon waterfront, or a burial at the Colon Cemetery, an interview with Fidel or with his American historical enemy Robert MacNamara, and the hard efforts Cuban families make to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of teenagers.
A special group of images within the exhibiton were certainly those devoted to tobacco, one of the exportable products of the island. Raquel intends to include viewers not only in a production process, from planting to consumption, but also in a culture in which the role of women and men is definitely essential. Therefore, the camera goes into the tobacco plantations, those hot houses for cultivated tobacco, those noisy tobacco factories where shape tobaccos with their knives, and the popular games of dominoes, and tables served with rum and tobacco where Cubans play their fate in front of orishas.
Raquel´s camera describes and prioritizes those elements that define an environment, a personality. Hence, the combination of traditional genres such as landscapes and portraits, the attention paid of details (such as hands) which are able to suggest an emotion, the unbiased use of digital technology to emphasize the expressive elements. The attentive but not complacent look of the current Cubans focused on these elements.
