Al Campo – Ernesto Bazan

As you may know I’ve been talking quite a lot about Cuba after spending 6 weeks there earlier this year shooting the Santeria story and Havana travel guide. So Naturally if I hear about any interesting work from there I’m into seeing it.

Whilst in Hamburg visiting a photography gallery there, in the bookshop I found a book called Al Campo by Ernesto Bazan, a book for which he created his own publishing house to produce, in order to keep full creative freedom, and funded it through kickstarter.

It’s a long time since I’ve been so genuinely blown away by a piece of work, but that is exactly what happened here. Shooting what some may see as a fairly common subject (these days) of Cuban campesinos (rural communities) here Bazan has produced an incredibly moving and intimate body of work. You can see the amount of time and trust that exists in the photos, and often compositions that my technical head initially is unsure of like cutting faces in half and unusual angles, plus sometimes of the simplest of things, just work so incredibly well.

A true masterpiece Ernesto, I can see how it took 14 years to produce this work.