Absolutely lovely. Very restrained and elegant and a clear collaboration... What a wonderful project. I had always wanted to see Cuba before I kicked the bucket, but now.... maybe I have this book and that's enough.
Sally Mann, Photographer & Author of What Remains, Deep South, Proud Flesh, and The Flesh and the Spirit The Flesh and the Spirit.
Don Noble: UA Photographer captures Havana
La Habana Vieja, Harrison Gallery, Tuscaloosa, AL 2012
Havana, Cuba, The Arts Company, Nashville, TN 2012
La Habana Vieja, City of Mobile Museum, Mobile, AL 2012
Harrison Gallery Show - Thursday, April 12 • 5-7 pm
The Arts Company - Salon Saturday, April 14, 2-4 pm - A Rare Art Adventure.
BBC NEWS MAGAZINE - Old Havana: A Cuban and an American explore a city.
TUSCALOOSA NEWS: Tuscaloosa Photographer's Work Examines Heart of Cuba in Book.
Old Havana: Spirit of the Living City' full of vibrant photography
John Sledge / Mobile Press-Register
SEE ARTICLE on MOBILE.AL.COM here
Posted: 03/18/2012 1
MOBILE, Alabama -- Havana, Cuba, has long been an exotic and only partially understood city. Throughout its history, artists, mapmakers, lithographers, engravers and photographers have been intrigued by its setting, its architecture and its people. While their efforts to depict these things have varied in verisimilitude, the artistic impulse has been strong in all of them. Among the most accomplished of these artists was the American photographer Walker Evans, who traveled to Havana in 1933 and returned with a sheaf of wonderful images.
In this time-honored tradition come now two photographers, one American and one Cuban, with a visually lush celebration of the old city that will likely fire the imagination of even well-traveled observers. "Old Havana: Spirit of the Living City" (Alabama, $49.95) by Chip Cooper and Nestor Marti is a gorgeous visual meditation on flaking paint, sun-warmed stone, centuries-old facades, vintage automobiles and some of the most beautiful people on the planet. Every picture is in color, and most of them nearly fill to the edges the glossy outsize pages.
Cooper and Marti's collaboration began in 2008 at the request of Dr. Eusebio Leal Spengler, historian of the city of Havana and director of the Habana Vieja restoration project. Working in concert, they spent hours in the city's oldest quarter. In an essay accompanying the images, Philip D. Beidler describes their method as a "dance of the photographers." Likening their style to an infantry patrol, Beidler writes, "Working together, working separately, they would unite, advance, diverge, rejoin, one finding a shot, the other facing elsewhere, both finding a subject simultaneously, yet working completely different angles." The resultant images are identified by minimal captions and the photographer's initials.
Many Alabamians will be familiar with Cooper, who was director of photography for 33 years at the University of Alabama and whose pictures have graced the pages of Alabama Heritage magazine as well as numerous books, including "Alabama Memories" and "Silent in the Land." His talent and his sensibility are more than equal to the many distinctive opportunities he found on Havana's worn cobbles. Marti, on the other hand, will be a delightful new discovery for most readers. He is a young man, only 28, but has worked for the Havana Historian's Office for over a decade. His photographs are imbued with a deep love for his homeland and its people. His street scenes and portraits are particularly good, while Cooper excels at interiors and architectural detail.
Adding greatly to the flavor of this volume is the thorough bilingual presentation. Everything - title, jacket blurbs, foreword, introductory essays, captions, dedications - - is printed in both English and Spanish. Some of this material was originally written in English and then translated, and some vice versa. In reading both the English and the Spanish, I can testify to the professionalism and care of the various translators, though perhaps not surprisingly the original versions are the more polished. The admirable result, however, is a book that refreshingly bears no linguistic chauvinism. This nicely reflects the obvious respect these gifted photographers have for each other.
The images themselves are roughly divided into broad categories - the bayfront, the buildings, streets, plazas and promenades, the vivid colors on display, street life, architectural details, and so on, with lots of overlap among them. As anyone who has been to Cuba knows, the centuries-old buildings, most suffering from poor maintenance, are most striking. Free from any significant recent investment or modern signage, the architecture appears locked in amber - is it 2008 or is it 1708 in these pictures?
The people, of course, provide the context. Havana's population displays a multiracial identity, with the predominant skin tone being a warm cafe au lait. The children are for the most part well-dressed, many in red-and-white school uniforms, as they perambulate the streets or exult in play. That the revolutionary spirit is still alive is confirmed by a cigar-chomping, goateed man clad in a blue beret emblazoned with Che's famous visage. A brighter hint of the Cuba to come is betrayed in an overhead shot of a lovely senorita passing by, her blue blouse slightly off her brown shoulders and silvered sandals adorning her pretty feet. Though one can hardly mind-read from a photograph, it's doubtful she's thinking about Che.
Photograph after photograph impress on the reader that Havana is a very old place. But as the shots of children and the senorita demonstrate, it's brimming with new life as well. Thanks to Cooper and Marti's efforts, we can now have a vivid sense of both these aspects of Cuba's reality.
John Sledge edits the Press-Register's Books page. He may be reached at the Press-Register, P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.
Photographer Chip Cooper's new book
features images from Old Havana
Joey Kennedy -- The Birmingham News
Posted: 03/11/2012
Old Havana, or La Habana vieja as the Cubans write it, is a city in decay. Plaster is falling off some buildings, and cracks zig-zag along ancient, long-neglected walls.
Old Havana also is a city in dramatic rebirth. The signs of renovation are everywhere: Scaffolding rises stories high, with craftsmen working precariously close to the edges. The smell of fresh paint is common, as is the sight of wet concrete.
Through it all, the proud people of old Havana - happy children and teens, overburdened adults and the aged - live and learn, work and play.
Alabama photographer Chip Cooper and Cuban photographer Nestor Marti have accomplished a remarkable feat in accurately capturing and reflecting the multiple personalities of this mysterious city in a just-released coffee-table book "Old Havana: Spirit of the Living City" (The University of Alabama Press)
DETAILS
Who: Chip Cooper, signing "Old Havana: Spirit of the Living City"
Where: Alabama Booksmith, 2626 19th Place South, Homewood
When: Tuesday at 4 p.m.
The 228-page volume weighs in at 3 1/2 pounds and displays more than 200 color photographs taken over three-plus years of work, starting in 2008. Cooper was asked by Eusebio Leal Spengler, the historian of the City of Havana and the man who is directing the restoration of old Havana, to pair up with Marti, a photographer for the Havana Historian's Office.
Cooper was already known in Cuba; as artist-in-residence at Alabama's Honors College and an instructor in the College of Arts and Sciences, he is part of the Alabama-Cuba Initiative, which (since 2002), brings UA and Cuban educators together. His landscape photographs have been widely published and exhibited, and Cooper has published six previous books of his own.
" am, at 62, lucky to be able to say I did my finest work when other people are winding down," Cooper said. In early February, the book was launched at the end of a five-day trip to Havana. "The day we showed the book, Cubans came up to me and said, 'You did it. You captured our spirit.'
"So much of my subject matter (landscapes) can't talk back to me," Cooper said, with a short laugh.
This work is remarkable on many levels. Though mainly a photo book, there are 18 pages of essays, in both English and Spanish, including forwards from Spengler and Robert F. Olin, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Alabama. There also are essays by Magda Risik Aguirre, communications director of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana, and Alabama English Professor Philip D. Beidler.
The book is divided into themed sections that feature people, architecture, the bay and water along the famous Malecon, statues, alleyways, doorways and, yes, more people.
Cooper stresses that he and Marti wanted to show "the good, bad and ugly" of old Havana. These photographs accomplish that goal.
Coincidentally, Cooper and Marti developed a fast rapport when they learned each other's favorite photographer was Walker Evans. Evans shot photographs in Havana for a book in the early 1930s, but, of course, became famous for documenting the Black Belt of Alabama later that decade in James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."
The more Cooper and Marti (no relation to Jose Marti) worked together the next 3 1/2 years, the more they complemented each other's individual styles.
"Egos are involved in this," Cooper said, noting that it is rare for two photographers to publish a book together. “His work had to be great if my work was going to look great, and vice-versa."
Cooper said Beidler, who often accompanied the artists on their Old Havana expeditions, described the way they worked together as the "dance of the photographers." An example: One day, Cooper and Marti discovered a charismatic church service in a cramped room, and asked if they could shoot.
"Nester and I ended up sitting on this bench, and we were shooting over each other. He'd shoot left, and I'd shoot right, and it was as if we were one," Cooper said. "Nester and I didn't realize what we were doing. We were capturing one event, together, from both perspectives. It was like we were dancing together."
For now, the curtain has come down on that dance; however, Cooper and Marti have left a beautiful, compelling, visual record of it through the photographs in "Old Havana."
Joey Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer at The News, is a frequent visitor to Old Havana.
It's fascinating to see the same city through two sets of highly observant
eyes. Chip Cooper is swept away, enthralled by the sky, the sea, the color
and heat of life in one of the Western Hemisphere's most fascinating cities.
Nestor Marti's vision is closer to the earth; he seeks out the surfaces of
decay and the irony of poverty amidst tropical richness. Joined together,
their visions are complementary and moving - a testament to two ways of
seeing, echoing and informing the contrasts between Cuba and the United
States.
Mark Childress, author of Georgia Bottoms and Crazy in Alabama.
Chip Cooper has spent the last three decades defining a sense of place that few, if any, modern photographers have been able to capture. The images throughout his books have not only been poignantly beautiful, they have also raised awareness of our architectural past and the need to preserve it. With his latest book, Old Havana, it seems clear to me that Chip is working at the kind of world-class level we may not have seen since the days of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. He is THAT good.
Mark Mayfield, former Editor-in-Chief of House Beautiful magazine & Arts and Antiques magazine.
Chip and Nestor have captured the essence of old Havana , - its people, its harbor, its streets and alleyways, balconies and balustrades. Lives passing by windows and arched doorways, an older world fixed in time, hauntingly familiar somehow,...the spirit perhaps of a longed-for deja vu,
an adventure to be had."
-- Jim Harrison 3rd, Chairman Arts Council, Alabama State Council on the Arts
"Even if you've been to the old city of Havana, you haven't really seen it fully, or understood it fully, until you've seen this timeless and timely portrait of one of the most fascinating and romantic places in the world. Cooper and Marti, united in and inspired by their admiration for the great American photographer Walker Evans--are wonderfully complementary masters of their art. In Their photographs--vibrant, respectful, witty, and sometimes truly epic in their vision--along with the accompanying texts--create a kind of imagistic dialogue. The result is a moving panorama of past and present, generality and specificity, the stillness of stone, the drama of the sea, the vividness of the human presence and present in a place saturated by the past. It's a really spectacularly beautiful and sophisticated book.
Daniel Menaker, former editor The New Yorker, former Executive Editor in Chief Random House, & author of Friends and Relations: A Collection of Stories, The Old Left: Stories, and The Treatment.
Like so many Americans my age, Havana was that exotic, other-worldly paradise where our parents' generation dreamed of lulling away the hours in the sun in those heady years of the American Century, after World War II. That is, until revolution transformed this dream into our nation's collective nightmare. My childhood is filled with memories of the "Missile Crisis," neighbors' bomb shelters and air raid drills. Yet, in it all, Havana as it truly was, was lost in both our dreams and in our nightmare. We seemed somehow to never get it right.
Chip Cooper and Nestor Marti's Havana: Spirit of the Living City / La Habana: El espiritu de la ciudad viva is a gift to all of us. Their images are filled with the life, vitality and passion that is Havana. They tell a story of this magnificent place in the alleys and the plazas, on the facades and in the faces of the living.
Maybe Walker Evans did get it right when he made his way, camera on tripod, through these same streets and alleys by day, meeting up with Hemingway by night, but few have followed. That is until now. Cooper and Marti have captured the soul of this place, this truly beautiful place.
Robert Hicks
author of The Widow of the South
and A Separate Country
The photographs are full of love for the Cubans and … give us the dignity that really fills us with pride.
Julio Larramendi Photographer & Author of Havana Cuba
Photographing Cuba has become a must do cliche for photographers. Go there and find the same old rusting cars and rotting buildings done a million times. What's the point?
Chip Cooper arrives to collaborate with native Nestor Marti, and I don’t know if that made a difference; but Cooper goes way beyond the worn-out clichés. He was smart enough to hold off the first time he set eyes on a strange, foreign land and resisted photographing things that only looked strange to foreigners. He soaked up the people, places and long culture of the country, the sights, sounds and smells and then he went to work to document with images and his feelings.
What results is like a fresh morning wind blowing off the Atlantic. It feels so good! Cooper sees the port as stormy, perhaps a metaphor of the past and the future. Nestor Marti sees it more calm and sunny. It is wonderful to see the viewpoints of two photographers in love with the country and its people.
Our eyes feast on people fishing, sitting, and enjoying the sun. A street corner becomes magical in the twilight.
I know the freshness, poetry and charm of these photos because as Photo Editor of TIME magazine I saw millions of photos over 25 years, including thousands of Cuba in conflict and peace.
What Chip Cooper and Nestor Marti have accomplished should be seen by everyone who is fascinated by the great country south of the United States. Go there and see for yourself through their images.
ROBERT STEVENS, former Photo Editor, Time Magazine
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