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The Candid Frame: Conversations on Photography

TCF Ep. 482 - Ernesto Bazan

The Candid Frame: Conversations on Photography

Ibarionex R. Perello

Cameras, Art, Photoshop, Visual Arts, Career, Interviews, Photographers, Arts, Photography, Photo, Digital

4.8749 Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2019

⏱️ 74 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Italian photojournalist Ernesto Bazan first traveled to Cuba in 1992 and immediately fell in love with the county and its people; he felt transported to the Sicily of his childhood. After many more trips, Bazan finally moved to Cuba in 1997, documenting daily life, raising a family, and teaching photography classes during the "Special Period." Bazan's images document the country's socioeconomic crisis and the tensions between rich and poor after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of its financial support. He captured the Cuban people's despair and hopelessness as well as their joy, resilience, and dignity of his neighbors. This fourteen-year project--awarded a W. Eugene Smith Fund Award for Humanist Photography--documents the island's struggle to maintain its socialist identity in a post-communist world.   Photographer Links:    Education Resources:   Candid Frame Resources   Download the free Candid Frame app for your favorite smart device. Click here to download for . Click here to download Support the work we do at The Candid Frame with contributing to our Patreon effort.  You can do this by visiting or visiting the website and clicking on the Patreon button. You can also provide a one-time donation via . You can follow Ibarionex on and .

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, I'm Matthew Gore from Wellington, New Zealand.

0:03.1

Welcome to the Candid Frame.

0:12.4

For those of us who are blessed enough to travel the world, you have likely visited a place that you've fallen in love with.

0:20.4

It's a part of the world that provides you an experience so unique, so special, that no other

0:26.7

place can even compare.

0:29.3

And if you're very lucky, you may have had the chance to visit that location repeatedly

0:35.3

and enjoyed it in an even more intimate and personal way.

0:39.8

Ernesto Bazan had just such an experience when he first visited Cuba, but the difference was it

0:46.9

became the place that he called home. For him, Cuba was a unique country that not only reminded

0:53.4

him of his native Sicily decades before,

0:56.9

it also became the inspiration for his life's work, which has resulted in three books on a country

1:03.3

that welcomed him, forced him out, and later welcomed him again.

1:07.6

I went to Havana in November of 92, and I was shocked, because as I told you, before,

1:16.5

I felt like I was in Palermo, but not the Palermo of the 1960s, in the Palermo of the

1:22.9

1940s, because of the time warp that the island find itself in even now.

1:28.3

So I was like in a place that I'd never been before.

1:32.3

I mean, I travel all across Asia, Africa, you know, you name it, South America.

1:39.3

But you know, Cuba was unique.

1:42.3

While many say that life as a photographer is a dream of theirs,

1:47.4

Ernesto can claim that his inspiration to become a photographer came from an actual dream.

1:54.0

As a teenager, he awoke one morning with the idea clearly burned into his mind,

2:00.0

and it changed his life forever.

...

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